You’ll see a drop in organic search traffic to your website, and your website will start to slip down in the search results. That’s when you might start to panic a little, because you might have received a penalty from Google. A penalty has a major impact on your website’s traffic.
Google’s mission is to organize all information on the web and make it accessible, and to that end, Google has established guidelines. If you violate these guidelines, you will receive a penalty and your website will drop in the search results.
With Google Search Console, Google offers a way to prevent a penalty. After all, when it comes to penalties, prevention is better than cure. It can sometimes be difficult to recover from a penalty.
A Google penalty is imposed on webmasters who do not comply with Google’s guidelines.
If Google determines that you are violating its guidelines, you will receive a penalty.
A penalty will cause your ranking in search results to drop, or—in the worst-case scenario—you’ll disappear from the search results altogether.
One example of failing to follow the guidelines is buying links. Google wants you to build a natural backlink profile through link building, not to buy links. Other examples of penalties include:
The simple answer to this is no. Not every drop in the ranking of a URL or a specific keyword means you’ve been penalized.
Search result rankings fluctuate constantly. For example, if your competitor has implemented optimization measures, it’s possible that their page has outperformed yours.
As a result, your competitor will rise in the rankings and you will fall. That is why search engine optimization is an ongoing process. Google also implements hundreds of updates each year, which can also affect your rankings.
Google Search Console is a free service from Google that makes it easy to track how your websites are performing in search results.
Before you can monitor and manage your website in Google Search Console, you must first verify that you are the website owner. Linking your website to Google Search Console is easy.
Go to: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=nl and sign in with your Google account. Then click “Add Property.” In the pop-up window, enter your website’s URL and click “Continue.”
Next, you can verify that you are the owner of the website. You have five options for proving that you are the owner of the website. These are:
You don’t set up this mapping for just one URL. Websites can be accessed via four different variants: the https non-www, http non-www, https www, and http www variants. For our website, this means we’ve mapped the following four variants to Google Search Console:
Google Search Console provides a lot of valuable information and allows you to monitor your website’s performance in search results. By actively improving your website and responding to the information from Google Search Console, you can avoid a penalty.
Google Search Console is the most important indicator of errors. When you proactively address the errors flagged by Google Search Console, Google takes note of this as well.
The main cause of a penalty is a backlink profile that violates Google’s guidelines. Google Search Console shows you which websites link to your website. This backlink profile is important for your ranking in search results. After all, if many high-quality websites link to you, Google assumes that your website also contains high-quality content.
The reverse is also true: if many low-quality websites link to yours, you’ll be hit with a penalty. If you notice a significant drop in your search rankings, it’s a good idea to check which links Google has indexed. Since you have an overview of all links, you can exclude harmful ones using the Google Disavow Tool and thus recover from the penalty.
If your website contains errors, Google will notify you with a message. You don’t even need to open Google Search Console to see this—you’ll receive an email. Examples of errors that Google would rather not see include:
Google sends this notification, of course, so that you’ll take action on it. So if you respond proactively to notifications from Google Search Console, Google will take that into account. This could also have a positive effect on the website’s ranking in search results.
A website must be accessible to Google. Google Search Console shows you whether the website is being crawled and indexed. The crawler visits your website, collects all new and updated URLs, and sends them to the indexing system.
The indexing system determines the content of the URL and ensures that it appears in the search results. If the crawler is blocked, this is also indicated in Google Search Console.
The tool displays crawl errors, 404 errors, as well as blocking resources that prevent indexing. In addition, Google Search Console also indicates which HTML improvements can be made.
Google doesn’t want websites with spam or malware. Google Search Console also shows you whether the website is free of spam or malware. If the website has such issues, Google will take action by lowering its ranking in search results or even removing it from search results altogether. Google Search Console also shows whether the website has been hacked, allowing you to respond proactively.
The mobile version of your website is becoming increasingly important. Google Search Console shows you all the errors on the mobile version of your website. This allows you to check whether the website is functioning properly on mobile devices and to take action when necessary.
If you’ve done something that violates Google’s guidelines, you may receive a manual action. This will result in your website no longer appearing in search results, either partially or at all.
Google Search Console shows you this manual action and the URL it applies to, as well as step-by-step instructions on how to resolve the issue. Once you’ve resolved all the issues, you can request a reconsideration here. You’ll receive progress updates via email.
These days, many penalties are imposed in real time by the Google algorithm, but it’s still possible to receive a manual penalty from Google employees.
Google Search Console provides a wealth of valuable information and tools. You can use the data from Google Search Console to prevent your website from suddenly dropping in rankings. By continuously working on your content and user experience, you ensure that you comply with Google’s guidelines.
For example, take a look at which search queries are boosting your rankings and which ones are causing them to drop. Are you ranking poorly for certain search queries? If so, there’s a good chance your content is too thin or out of date. Make sure you’re actually answering the visitor’s search query. Create detailed and in-depth content for these search queries. You’ll see that your performance improves.
In the Performance section, you can see the number of clicks, impressions, and the average click-through rate. You can view this data at the keyword and page levels, among others. If a page’s click-through rate is low but it’s still getting a lot of impressions, you should consider updating the page titles and meta descriptions. Apparently, they aren’t encouraging users to click through to your website.
All information from Google Search Console is valuable to incorporate into a search engine optimization process. We recommend that you review the data from Google Search Console at least once a month and incorporate these results into your optimization efforts.
To ensure that you’re always up to date on your status, we, as an SEO agency, recommend that you check Google Search Console regularly. Be sure to do this at least once a week.
Our final tip is that you should definitely not fixate on a potential penalty. Google wants every visitor to have a good experience, so focus primarily on that.
Be proactive and keep optimizing your website. Don’t wait for a drop in traffic; keep optimizing. The most important thing you can do is avoid Black Hat SEO and follow Google’s guidelines.
Jarik Oosting is one of the Netherlands’ best-known SEO and GEO specialists and is the founder of SmartRanking. With more than 15 years of experience, he has worked on over 150 SEO and GEO projects for Dutch and international companies. His expertise ranges from technical SEO and complex migrations to strategies and visibility in AI models.
In January 2025, Jarik introduced GEO (also called AEO) to the Netherlands. He wrote the Dutch book “GEO – Zichtbaar zijn in de antwoorden van AI” about AEO, is an author and editor at Frankwatching, and a contributor to Marketingfacts. As a speaker at events, he shares his knowledge about SEO, GEO, and the search landscape.