Try a Penalty Checker to Verify Search Engine Penalties

By Peter Kent from Search Engine Optimization For Dummies, 5th Edition

To confirm whether your website has been penalized by Google, you may want to try a “Google penalty checker”; you can find one by doing a search. The tool creators generally don’t tell you exactly how they determine whether your site has been penalized; still, they may provide a little confirmation of what’s going on, a sort of “second opinion.”

You may get different results from a penalty checker than you get when you perform these checks yourself; for instance, things may still look bad to you — Google won’t return your site in the result when you search for text in your home page’s <TITLE> tag or page content, perhaps — and yet the penalty checker says there’s no penalty.

That result may be because of the difference between Google data centers; different locations get results from different Google data centers, and it takes time for changes to propagate all the way across all data centers.

Some of these penalty checkers are no good. But Li’l Engine seems okay, and perhaps they’re getting better in general. Still, they don’t have any secret channel to Google; they’re just using a standard set of checks.