On Friday I discussed how you can tell if Google has banned your site and what you have to do to get back into the index. It is a fairly cut and try penalty – either you are in the index or you are not. But what happens when you rank for some search terms but not others? Do you have a Google penalty or are you just suffering from a drop in rankings because your competition is getting stronger? Parts 2 and 3 of this series will focus on the grayer areas of Google penalties.

Check if you rank for your domain name and other important keywords

Assuming more than your homepage comes up in the site:www.yourdomain.com search the next thing to look for is if you rank for the keywords in your domain. For example, the Young Entrepreneur website ranks at the top of Google for the keyword “young entrepreneur”. The only title tags on the YE homepage are also “Young Entrepreneur”.

The domain name and homepage title tags represent the most important keywords for your site. They should the ones that you have the highest chance of ranking for unless you have picked an extremely competitive industry. Part two of testing the degree of a Google penalty is to look at keywords that you used to rank #1 for and keywords that you should be ranking #1 for.

If your homepage title tag is “Make Money Online” then you are in for quite a battle to get ranked but if it is “Mark Smith Nature Tours” and you own www.MarkSmithNatureTours.com then there is a serious problem if your site is not coming up in the number one position.

What to do

If the important keywords that only you should be ranking for are not bringing up your site then you have been penalized and must follow similar steps as if you have been banned. You have engaged in some kind of activity that Google frowns upon and you have to rectify it, go to Google’s Webmaster Tools and submit a reconsideration request. Tell them what you did wrong and promise not to do it again. If you cannot find the problem, bring on a professional who can help you before you try to contact Google.

I will finish off this series later this week to give you a complete plan for how to check if you have been penalized by Google.

Evan Carmichael