The SEO industry does refer to the Google algorithmic penalties as a catch-all for websites that fail to live up to the expectations, but it actually isn’t totally wrong because there aren’t algorithmic penalties. There are google penalties, but these are manual spam actions, and there are google algorithms and the update for this, both of which determine how the sites rank, but it’s essential to understand that they are totally different things that can be influenced in some way.

The algorithms at the core are re-calculations, and it essentially is what people use for the most part. Google panda works on the page content quality, with penguin being off-page signals and likely these are both cited and feared. While there are more named algorithms and updates, it’s important that a few instances are named compared to the countless algorithm and updates that are released. There are major and minor changes every day, and usually, you have to be very on top of this. The release process is a secret, and while they rarely are perfect, they do evolve, and SEOs and marketers need to know these algorithms by the definitions that they are and don’t allow exceptions. Google has always denied the existence of black or white lists because they don’t exist.

Websites are affected by this, and when their signs are on and off page reach, and they aren’t static, they won’t have public contain information either.  This is why correlating certain events is really the only way to fully confirm whether or not a site was affected by these algorithms.

Unlike the manual penalties, Google won’t tell you if a site is affected by algorithms, but it definitely cannot be said that it won’t be influenced, it totally can. A substantial crawl of data on both off and on-page SEO can actually be seen when the google signals come up. The objective can only be obtained when conducting a site audit as well, so it’s best to apply different tools and data sources, including the information google, does have via the search console. In the best scenario, server logs covering an extended and recent period of time are used for verifying findings. The latter step is crucial for questions because it will determine how long it’ll take for Google to pick up these new and improved signals before it can improve again.  Really, it can only be answered based on the site and depends on how indexed and crawled the site is. Large sites typically waste it on prioritization signals but small ones do manage their budget better.

Google could detect and filter most of this, but search is very complex, and no one has been able to come up with an algorithm that matches the human ingenuity, so it definitely is important to realize that the penalizations usually don’t have anything to do with the algorithm, and instead, it has to do with how you’re manually using the site at hand.