With the string of major updates by Google many people have seem dramatic changes in their search engine rankings. I often get the question, “How do I know if my website has been penalized by Google?” In light of the recent changes Google has been very open and upfront about any penalties a website incurs.

Finding out if your website has been penalized is very easy. You need to have a Google webmaster tools account. It is free to sign up and they do have some neat webmaster tools to offer. They report to you on key phrases that bring you traffic and sites that link to you.

The best thing about that is that since they have a verified owner of a website they know who to contact if there is a problem with a site. So even if your website was penalized 2 months ago, as soon as you sign up and add your site to their system, you will get a back dated notice telling you why your site has been moved down in the rankings.

If you don’t get a message like that then your site has not been penalized, it has dropped in the rankings for some other reason. It could simply be that other website owners are doing better SEO than you are. It could be just change in what Google weighs as important in their algorithm.

If you do get a message from Google, the message will tell you in a vague way what the offense was. Lately the majority of websites that have been penalized are receiving the message that Google has detected unnatural links pointing to the persons website and once you have removed those links you should do a reconsideration request.

If you want the penalty removed then you have to submit to whatever Google wants you to do. They seem to be pretty quick about giving back high rankings after you resolve the problem. I have personally seen rankings come back within a week of a reconsideration request although the offense was very minor and easy to fix.

So if you haven’t done so already, go sign up for Google Webmaster Tools. Yeah it is a way for Google to keep tabs on you, but if you rely on them for the majority of your traffic it is best to play by their rules.

If you have been paying attention at all in the last few weeks you have probably heard how Google is coming down hard on companies that run link networks, and also websites that use those networks to get links.

I have heard countless recent stories of people losing their rankings and receiving a message from Google in their webmaster tools account that says they are being penalized for having links pointing to their site that appear to be unnatural and are only there to increase page rank.

If you have participated in a link network, what can you do? Contact the company you used to build links and tell them to remove all links they have placed for you. Some companies will do this, others wont. But if you go back to Google to do a reinclusion request and tell them you have done all you can do to get the links taken down they should have pity on you and take off the penalty.

How do you know if a link building company is a link network? The links a link network will get you are going to all be from really crappy looking blogs that have horrible content that most of the time doesn’t even make grammatical sense. Another tell tell sign is the company will not tell you where they get the links. This is because they don’t want Google to know either. It is a safeguard but a risky one for you.

I guess getting links the old fashion hard way is going to be how all of us build our rankings from now on. The good news is that SEO Scheduler gives you hundreds of places to get links that are not part of any link network.