If you have a web site and unaware of the major change recently that Google rolled out in April called Google Penguin, you may be in for a rude awakening when searching for your web site’s ranking performance in the search engine ranking pages. Google Penguin 1.1 was Google’s attempt to punish web sites that may be 
spamming Google with keyword stuffing, cloaking, and unnatural linking that may violate the Google’s Webmaster guidelines.
How do you know if your web site was hit?
Before the Google Penguin update, Google sent out emails through Google Webmaster Central about spamming offenses, but not everybody received one. Google did not make any official way to know if your site was part of their Google Penguin update. The only way to know if your site was hit by the Google Penguin update is to do a search in your Google Analytics account for the time period right before and right after the update hit on April 24th 2012. If you see a significant drop in traffic a day or two after the update hit, then your site was more then likely affected. If you see a spike in traffic a day or two after the update was rolled out, then the update was a good thing for your site and worked in your favor. If you see no change at all in traffic a day or two after the update was introduced, then your site was not affected.
Google Penguin Recovery
Since this recent update was targeting spam on the web, you might want to remove all spam associated with your site. You may also want to check your Google Webmaster’s Account for any messages that Google may have sent to you referencing any spam that your site may be producing. If you received no messages but still you are sure that the update affected your site’s performance in the search engine ranking pages, you may put in a request for reconsideration with Google, but since this updated was with Google algorithm, a Google Reconsideration request will more then likely do nothing for helping your site and Google has no plans in making exceptions to the rules for no one. If you cannot get any momentum for helping your site recover, Google has a Webmaster Forum which is helpful for user’s to ask questions and to get answers for topics you are experiencing. The first thing to do is to make sure that you have removed all potential spam from your site which means adhering to Google Guidelines about keyword stuffing and the use of unnatural links to help your site rank better in the search engine ranking pages.
