You may notice that your pages disappear suddenly from the search results of a search engine such as Google or Yahoo. If that’s the case, you may want to check if your website has been penalized by the engine. In the current Search Enginecompetitive world of Internet, you could become the victim of search engine penalizations if your site is not administrated properly, like using inappropriate search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. Surely, search engine penalizations could also be caused by external factors.

Here are few points to let you verify whether a search engine penalization has possibly occurred to your website. Let me use Google as an example. Please be advised that there are no sure ways to conclude the occurrence of a penalization, unless you get a confirmation from the search engine.

Check to see if your site is completely de-indexed

This might be the simplest way to check for Google penalization. When your site is completely de-indexed by Google and it’s no longer in Google either with command “info:YourHomePageURL” or with command “site: YourHomePageURL”, it’s very likely your site has been penalized.

Check major keyword rankings

Assuming your site was top on Google search result for some of your keywords, a major and sudden drop in all those keywords could indicate that your website is being penalized by Google because your Google SERP is very down.

Check number of the indexed pages

I am sure you know a command “site:yourdomainname” in Google search box can check the indexed pages of your site. If a large number of pages from your website had been indexed in Google before but now only few left, your website could be in jeopardy with the search engine. However, I did see the problems of losing indexed pages due to glitches in certain search engines. Last year, we discovered the indexed pages of one of our sites dropped from hundreds to just the homepage overnight in Microsoft Live search. Actually that happened couple times but eventually all came back in about a month.

Check if you have Lost Page Weight

If your pages are properly indexed in the Google search engine, next thing you may want to check is the weight of these pages. If they are not appearing in search results or showing up very last in the list when queuing for your page title plus website name, it is possible your site has been penalized. For example, if “SEO secrets” is the title of your page while “searchengine101” is your domain name, you should search for “SEO secrets” + “searchengine101” to see where your page in the search results.

Check the dates of Google cache

Google Cache is another way to check if your website is being penalized by Google or not. Normally Google put websites on internet to its cache and this cache updates depend on many factor related to a website. Normally for popular websites like major news sites and leading B2B portals, the date of last cache is typically current date or just one day back. If you check your website with “cache: yourpageurl” in Google and find out the date of last cached is too old, it means Google is not showing much interest in your website anymore. It’s also likely a penalization.

Check the indexed number of Backlinks to your site

If you checked your website few days ago using Google “link” command and returned with thousands of backlinks and now see a huge drop, there is a great possibility that your site has been penalized.

Check how fast your new pages got indexed

How fast your new pages got indexed is another factor by which you can check for penalization. If your new pages used to be indexed within days or even hours but now take months, site penalization is a possible cause.

Check Google PageRank (PR) of your site

Google PageRank, 0-10, is a value attached to your website. The PR value may drop if Google has penalized your site for any reason.

Have you receive a mail from Google?

Google may send a mail to you when finding something harmful in your website. They will likely de-index the pages that contain problems and ask you to fix the problems before they are re-indexed.