How do I know if I have been hit with a Google penalty

[webguru2014]

How can you tell if you have been hit by the Panda update as I have a Page rank 3 Homepage, several 100 other pages but no page rank is flowing through to these pages they are all zero?

Thanks

[boballanjones]

Have you tried checking what pages you have cached in Google? search site:yourdomain.com and see what results come up. This should give you a good idea if your site is indexed ok. Also check your robots.txt isn't set to no follow.

[GPainter]

Robert gave some great advice, you can also check here - http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change and see if you have a large cliff like drop in Google analytics. It also depends how long your site has been active etc. as many people cry wolf with updates but it may be other things like robots.txt as Robert mentioned.

[webguru2014]

Hi Guys Thanks for the reply I have run site:ourdomain and the correct number of pages are showing, I have also checked the robot.txt is fine and cannot see any cliff like drop in analytics? Thanks

[GPainter]

Are you just looking at pagerank? Page rank doesn't tend to get update very often (once/twice a year ish) so i wouldn't use it as a metric try Moz's domain & page authority if you are concerned about flow.

quick one here are some of the previous updates to show you:

** Previous Updates**

• 5/6 December 2013
• 4 February 2013
• 7 November 2012
• 2 August 2012
• 2 May 2012
• 7 February 2012
• 7 November 2011

[David-Kley]

The first place to look at is your backlinks. If they all point at your homepage, its natural that it will have a higher pagerank than the subpages.

I doubt it was hit with a penalty, unless you have noticed a large drop in rankings. When you are hit with a manual penalty, Google will notify you via webmaster tools, so be sure to check that or if you dont have an account, set one up.

Also, how is the page interlinking set up? Do you constantly promote linking to your subpages using well placed anchor text? If the home page does not link to other pages, could be Google is not seeing them. Does the site have a sitemap submitted in webmaster tools?

[K-WINTER]

Could be your internal structure. Has anything changed or are you just not raising in the search engines as quickly as you would like? Judging by your earlier followup it sounds like more of the later, which would indicate you just need more good links flowing to your sub-pages.

As David said your backlinks probably all point to your homepage so that would be natural for it to rank much higher.

[webguru2014]

Thanks for the replies

Sorry I dont think I have been very clear the pages have not been assigned pagerank

The domain 2.5 years old with several 100 pages

[JaneCopland]

PageRank is a pretty outdated way of looking at a page's worth, especially because it's updated irregularly, and often fudged / inaccurate. Google realised a while ago that people used PageRank as a metric to buy and sell links, meaning that them making it very accurate was helping fund an industry they very much didn't like.

That said, 2.5 years with no internal PR showing up on any URL seems slightly odd. Do the pages show decent Moz metrics, like Page Authority?

Does the site sit on HTTPS URLs exclusively? At least a little while ago, that used to stop toolbar PR from showing up but it didn't mean that pages wouldn't rank.

It's also possible that the site receives few or no links from elsewhere, meaning that there is not much authority to be passed through the site from the home page or any other target page. Does this seem likely to you, looking at the site's links? As others have said, there could also be internal linking problems that halt the flow of authority, but 2.5 years is a while to show no internal tbPR whatsoever.