Google penalty checker

See whether your Search Console clicks moved in the last week, and which of Google's updates rolled out at the same time.

Google penalty checker reads your Google Search Console data and puts your daily clicks next to every update Google announced. It says whether your clicks in the last 7 days moved more than your usual day-to-day swing, which updates rolled out within 3 days of that week, and which pages, searches, devices and countries lost or gained the most.

It’s free for every site. Sign in, connect Search Console (read-only), pick a site and run it.

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What a Google penalty is

In Google’s own terms a penalty is a manual action: a person at Google decided a site breaks its spam policies. Only Search Console shows a manual action, on its Manual actions page, and no outside tool can see one. Most drops people call a penalty are algorithm updates (core updates, spam updates and others), which change how every site ranks. This tool checks your clicks against those updates.

An update that rolled out the same week as a drop did not necessarily cause it. The report says when a change lined up with an update, never that the update caused it. Your own changes, a season or a news story can move clicks too.

What you get

  • One line on the last 7 days: whether clicks fell, rose or held against the 83 days before, and by how much.
  • A chart of every day of Search Console data your site has (about 16 months), clicks or impressions, with each Google update as a band from its start to its end. Show or hide core updates, spam updates, other ranking updates and serving incidents.
  • The updates within 3 days of the last week, with their dates, whether each is still rolling out, and a link to Google’s page for it.
  • What moved: the pages, searches, devices and countries that lost or gained the most clicks against the week before, with their position. A slider hides the small changes.
  • Notes that point to Content decay and Title and CTR fixes when they find work on the same site, and what to check next.
  • CSV and JSON downloads, and Copy for agent.

How it works

  • Clicks are flagged only when the last 7 days differ from the days before by at least 10%, by more than twice the usual day-to-day swing, on a site with at least 50 clicks a week. A slow trend or a small site is not flagged: the report says there are too few clicks to tell.
  • The updates come from Google’s Search Status Dashboard, read for each run. Its feed reaches back about a year; older updates come from the same dashboard’s history. A run keeps the updates it used, so a saved report never changes.
  • Search Console leaves out searches it anonymizes for privacy. The report says what share of your clicks those were, and a search seen in only one of the two weeks is not counted as a loss.
  • It uses Search Console’s final data for web search, so the last 2 or 3 days are not in yet.

After a drop

  • Check your own changes from the days before it first: deploys, redirects, robots.txt, noindex and canonical tags, removed pages.
  • Check Search Console’s data anomalies page for days its reporting was wrong.
  • If an update is still rolling out, wait until a week after it ends before you change pages, then run this again.