: How to determine if site has been punished by Google I had a site that ranked top 3 for one keyword term and top 6 for another. At the beginning of October both terms dropped radically from

@Sue5673885

Just try to search in Google some "very unique phrase from your site" in quotes and check search results. If you will not find your site in first page of search results - than you are punished by Google.

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@Kristi941

Google only punishes a site if it is caught trying to manipulate the SERPs. If you saw a drop in your rankings immediately after making some big changes then the odds are those changes have played a role in the change in rankings you saw. The first thing you should do is undo the changes you have made if possible. If your ranking return you can start making changes again but do them one at a time so you can see what affect they have on your rankings. That will help you identify which change is affecting you the most.

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@XinRu657

Google Webmaster Tools is the first place to look - you can see which pages Googlebot expects to see which are now throwing a 404 error.

I wouldn't say that your site is being punished - that would imply that there is an intent behind the change in your rankings; it's really just a matter of showing Googlebot that the links to your bygone content are still relevant to your site.

If possible, I would use 301 redirects to push rank from the content which is no longer there to existing content which has similar relevance (or just back to the homepage) and set up a sitemap to ensure that all valid pages are enumerated for indexing.

This might also be a good time to work at building some new links to your site, as well - couldn't hurt and it may help to get Googlebot through your site sooner (depending upon your present indexing priority).

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