Can anybody tell me how to recognise whether my site is punished in google search engines or not? (Paranoia)

See if you rank no.1 for your company name ???

Were you ranking first page and then dropped? If you dropped past 200 then it's a punishment.

 

Have you had any warnings through webmaster tools?

 

Have you checked your backlinks to see if some have suddenly dropped off?

 

Maybe you've had an influx in backlinks?

 

Is your website still indexed?

 

Has your organic traffic stopped almost over night?

 

The very nature of this post and the fact you're worried you have been hit, suggests that you have been doing stuff that would get you punished.

A few checks mate.

 

• Try seaching for 'site:www.dmoz.org' swapping the domain for yours; does the search engine know about your site.
• Check webmaster tools for any messages.
• Check Webmaster Tools > HTML Improvements - If your site has lots of duplicate tags then you can be penalised. One of my sites got hit hard on this on the last Google update back in March 2012 but canonical links smoothed it out and the site is back and stronger to the tune of 50% extra traffic vs the same period before the hit. (ref see http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394).
• Keyword overdose - Do your pages hammer search terms too hard? A good way to tell is test your density with something like http://googlerankings.com/kdindex.php. Sure it's crude but it's not a bad starting point. The old days saw upto 25% density as ok but now it could be as low as 8% - 10% (any other comments to help here appreciated). There are some other tests but it would be keyword / site specific (e.g. geo search site vs static company site).
• Bad links - if you have loads of spam links from the dark ends of the internet they now no longer count and Google can hurt you for mixing with nasty link hoods. Again back to webmaster tools for this, you can track all inbound links.

Were you ranking first page and then dropped? If you dropped past 200 then it's a punishment.

 

Have you had any warnings through webmaster tools?

 

Have you checked your backlinks to see if some have suddenly dropped off?

 

Maybe you've had an influx in backlinks?

 

Is your website still indexed?

 

Has your organic traffic stopped almost over night?

 

The very nature of this post and the fact you're worried you have been hit, suggests that you have been doing stuff that would get you punished.

Haha yeah you just beat me to it ... my answer has links though

out of interest what type of link building have you been doing to the site ?

1. Check your website name in search box of Google. If the name is exist in Top 3 means you hadn't penalized by Google

2. Check your old keywords ranking and compare with current's one, If drop means you hited by Google

That's a little fuzzy to be honest. A drop doesn't necessarily mean you've been hit. Last month, I had a keyword that has been ranking #3 for over a year and it suddenly dropped 87 places. The next day it went back to position #3 and has been there ever since.

 

The Google 'churn'

The sudden change in ranking of keywords is called as Google dance, it is based on Google's indexing algorithm.

Meh churn, dance, shuffle, two step ... either way it's like shuffling the deck and dealing again.

That's a little fuzzy to be honest. A drop doesn't necessarily mean you've been hit. Last month, I had a keyword that has been ranking #3 for over a year and it suddenly dropped 87 places. The next day it went back to position #3 and has been there ever since.

 

Many time I saw these changes its called "Google Dance". Some times Google didn't count your backlinks and go ahead, in that case you lost your keyword ranking and next time when Google count all backlinks you got your rankng again.

If you have noticed your sudden ranking down, than definitely you had get effected with Google punishment.

Check Google algorithm update history and see if your "drop" is corresponding with the dates or not. If you are not sure when you got punished, you can check Google webmasters tool for messages, compare traffic of this month to the previous month (or previous year - same time - traffic) in Google Analytics. Also, try to check your tracked keyword more often than you used to, if you see any sudden and permanent drop in any ranking (so there is no chance of "Google dance") than you might be facing a penalty of some sort or increased competition in terms.

This is may be Google dance effect or also you check your back links weather they from niche websites or not.