Google is the largest search engine globally, and as a business owner, it’s essential to make sure that your website is in good standing with them. If your site isn’t ranked high enough, or if it has been penalized by Google, you could be losing out on a lot of potential traffic and revenue. This blog post will discuss how to determine if your site is in good standing with Google and what you can do if it isn’t.
A Simple Site Search
The first and most essential thing you may do is conduct a quick site search on Google. A site search is when you utilize the SITE operator to look for only parts of your domain on a website. For example, “site:brandbuilders.io” would work. When you visit that Google search, you’ll notice (as of this writing) around 113 results. That’s an accurate count of the number of pages on my website, including blog entries, infographics, landing sites, the home page, system pages, category page, etc.
Check for Sitelinks
You can accomplish this with the unfiltered site search but not the filtered one. In the search results for my domain, I see the URL, followed by the page’s title, then the document’s description, and finally a series of links. Now they’re Service, Company, Contact, and Blog. Sitelinks are also known as named links.
They’re an extra element that Google uses to provide easy access to pages users may be interested in, especially for general queries such as this. It’s a method of allowing users to quickly get to the relevant page on your site instead of having you use your navigation system to lead them there, which might not be as simple.
Check the Google Search Console
The Google Search Console, formerly known as Webmaster Tools, is a tool that shows you how your site is doing. There’s a lot of data there, but the most important thing is the “manual actions” report.
A penalty is a Google term for something that must be done manually. If you break a rule, they may impose a manual action on you. They can lift the manual action if you correct the problem, restoring your site to its prior position and any fluctuations that occurred while it was penalized.
Look for Referral Traffic in Analytics
Another method you may use is to look at your overall site traffic and a breakdown of that traffic by source in Google Analytics.
Suppose your organic traffic is zero or significantly lower than it should be (comparing it to previous patterns). In that case, there’s a chance that you’ve tampered with an algorithmic change in the recent past.
Check Moz’s Ranking
Moz is a well-known SEO tool with over one million users. You’ll want to examine your Domain Authority in this case. Your DA score is measured on a scale of 1 to 100, with 100 being the greatest. Only a tiny proportion of websites ever achieve a rating of 100. If you’re new or small, aim for 10-20; if you’re more medium-sized aim for 30-40; and if your site is large or excellent (think Forbes, HuffPo, and so on), opt for 80+.
So, is your website in good standing with Google? If not, contact BrandBuilders today to see how we can help!
