A Google penalty is a negative impact on a site’s visibility. There are two types of Google penalties. They are algorithm penalty and manual penalty. Let us understand what these two types of penalties are.
Manual penalty: Manual penalties are the Google penalties that are not triggered by a Google algorithm. On contrary, they are handed down by a Google webspam team member.
Algorithmic penalty: A website suffers an algorithm penalty when Google makes changes in its algorithm to provide better search engine results.
You might already know Google makes 400 to 500 algorithmic changes. So, no matter how good your SEO campaign is, it will be affected. Sometimes, business owners do not recognize a Google penalty. They think the drop in search engine ranking is because of stiff online competition.
Fortunately, we have various Google penalty checking tools. These tools are designed to check whether your site is hit by a Google penalty. Consequently, your Google penalty recovery becomes easy. Here are the top 10 Google penalty checking tools you should be using.
1. Fruition Google penalty checker
Fruition Google penalty checker comes with the both free and paid option. The free version has some basic features, whereas the paid version has some advanced features. Well, that is pretty obvious, isn’t it? Here are the things you can do with the free version.
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Check two websites for Google penalties
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Obtain a chat to know which penalty has affected your site
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Get the last three months’ results
The free option is good if you want to monitor two websites. However, if you want to monitor more than two websites, upgrade to paid version. Here are the things you can do with the premium version.
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Monitor more than two websites continuously
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In-depth Google impact reports
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Discover the probability that your site was affected by an algorithmic update
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Customer support
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Option to share the reports to clients
2. SEMrush
SEMrush is an all in one marketing tool kit. Well, that is what they call themselves. When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), SEMrush is the most popular tool used by business owners, SEO experts, and webmasters.
Unlike other Google penalty checker tools, this one is a complete SEO tool. With this tool, you can do many things such as:
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Inbound link tracking
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Search engine rank tracking
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Desktop search breakdown
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Mobile search breakdown
So, why we are mentioning this SEO tool on this list? Yes, you guessed it right. This tool allows you to check whether your site is suffering from a Google penalty. So what makes this tool different from others? Well, this SEO tool gives your results in the form of a diagram, so that it easy to absorb the data and form opinion and conclusions.
3. Pixelgroove penalty checker
This is simple and easy to use an indicator tool. This penalty checker tool allows you to see if your site is penalized, sandboxed or deindexed. Let us understand what they mean.
Sandboxed: In this case, your website or web page is not deindexed or penalized. If your site is sandboxed, then it means Google has put your new websites under restrictions for a certain period of time, so that it does not rank in the search results. Google does this for all the new websites.
Deindexed: There are certain situations, where Google bans your website. That is, it completely removes your website from Google. In other words, no one can reach your website via Google.
Penalized: When your website is penalized, your domain or page still exists but none of them can be reached via a direct query. This can happen because of a manual or algorithm penalty.
After knowing the cause of low search engine ranking, you can adopt appropriate SEO measures or Google penalty recovery strategies to restore your online visibility.
4. Grump rating
This online tool is quite different from the tools on this list. That is because this tool does not analyze your website. Instead, it analyzes Google. Yes, you read that right. It basically tells you the mood of Google and alerts you.
Grump rating gives you three types of alerts. They are:
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Chilled: It means you can relax. Changes in the Google algorithm are very unlikely.
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Cautious: It indicates that changes in the Google algorithm are possible.
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Grumpy: It means changes in the search engine algorithm are very likely.
So, as a business owner, you must check this rating regularly to stay on the top of algorithmic changes.
5. FE international website penalty indicator
Compared to SEMrush, the FE international website penalty indicator is a more reliable penalty checker tool. You can easily use this tool to track the impact of Google algorithm updates on your site.
However, we recommend you to use these tools as an indicator. It is good to conduct further verification to validate this indication. SEO analysts and digital marketers can keep an eye on dates of Google updates, changes in ranking and traffic so that it becomes easy to correlate all the things and come to an accurate conclusion.
6. Rank ranger
One of the most difficult jobs for an SEO expert is to keep track of Google updates. This is a difficult task because Google does not always announce updates. However, some updates are announced before time. For instance, Panda, Mobilegeddon, and Penguin updates were notified before they were out.
Rank ranger can be a lifesaver. A user can obtain in-depth information about both public and phantom updates. What is a phantom update? A phantom update is a Google update that is not announced by Google.
People love this penalty checker tool because of one reason. That is it provides easy to read charts. For easy understanding, your site will be shown in one out of three colors. They are blue, green, and red. Let us see what these colors mean to you.
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Blue color: Everything is fine. There is nothing to worry about.
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Green color: Your website is safe, but you have some problems.
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Red color: Your site is at risk.
The other good news is that Rank ranger is a free tool.
7. Moz Google algorithm change history
Google updates its algorithm quite frequently. And most of the time, it is these updates that become a reason for your drop in traffic and search engine ranking. Some updates become popular and manage to catch the attention of not only SEO agencies but also business owners. However, other updates remain cold.
Technically this is not a tool. It is a list maintained by MOZ that keeps track of Google updates. So, it is pretty obvious that it won’t help you to discover the old penalty. However, this can be a pretty useful tool for SEO. If you find low traffic from the day of any Google update, that means your site is hit with a Google penalty.
8. Penguin tool
This Google penalty checker tool has been in the SEO industry for a long time. SEO analysts, webmasters, and business owners find this SEO tool very helpful. Here is how it will help you to gain clarity.
With this tool you can easily see your website history, and how your site reacts to the Google algorithm updates. Here the data is presented in a user-friendly manner so that it becomes easy to grasp the details to take the required action.
Here are the plus points of using this online Google penalty checker tool:
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You can connect to Google Analytics
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Free Google organic section
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Free Google algorithm data
9. Google webmaster tools
Yes, this Google tool tells you about website errors and penalties. To know whether you are hit with a Google penalty, follow the below steps.
Step 1: Go to the Google search console dashboard
Step 2: Search for the navigation menu
Step 3: Click on the Manual Action tab
If you have any penalty, you will find a notification related to that particular penalty. If you have no penalty, you will see “No issue detected.” Note, this tools helps you to find a manual penalty. So, even if you get a “No issue detected” message, your site might be suffering from an algorithm penalty. So, use this tool only to check manual penalties.
10. CognitiveSEO
One of the most common reasons for a Google penalty is unnatural links. This is because everyone knows the importance of link building in search engine optimization. Most of us are desperate to build as many links as we can. As a result, most of us tend to build unnatural links, which attracts Google penalty.
This tool is actually a link analysis tool. With the help of this SEO tool, you can easily filter out all your unnatural links using its inbound link analysis tool. Furthermore, this tool can help you to create a disavow file to submit to Google.
