Can Google punish websites for using Google Analytics? Many users ask themselves this question. The quick answer off the bat is: no. According to a recent tweet by expert John Müller, Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, there is no punishment or penalty for using Google Analytics. So, there’s no punishment, but there is also no special treatment for using Google products for searches. He gave his own website as an example since it utilizes Google Analytics and still has a score of 100 due to the fact that Google does not use the Lighthouse score for searches. But keep in mind that third-party scripts, such as from Google, can slow down the page load time of a website.
Worrying about penalties is legitimate though, since according to a study by the company and analysis tool “ahrefs”, almost every company receives a penalty from Google at least once during the lifespan of their website.
The basis used in determining a Google Penalty is the Google Webmaster Guidelines. If a website breaches these guidelines, Google will take appropriate measures. This could mean a penalty for the whole domain, for only certain keywords, for specific directories, for the hostname, or for several sites or domains, but could also even lead to a complete delisting of the website in Google’s index.
You are probably wondering now if you have breached the guidelines at some point without knowing. How do you even know if you have been penalized?
Generally speaking, penalties can be divided into two categories: manual actions and algorithmic actions. The former has become quite uncommon nowadays. It is dealt out via Search Console and you have a chance to respond to it. Once the penalties have gone through, the rankings then recover quickly, usually within 3-5 days.
Your prospects look quite different if you receive algorithmic action, though. These aren’t exactly a penalty as such, and are imposed by Google’s algorithm, for example the Google Penguin algorithm update. This “Penguin Penalty” addresses bad or even toxic links. They are effective immediately but can be rectified quickly. But these penalties are hard to recognize since you do not receive notification from Google; they are only recognizable in your rankings.
How can you recognize these penalties, like the Penguin filter? The first indication could be declining visitor numbers, since visibility suffers. But Google’s various filters dish out differing consequences. If a penalty is imposed upon individual keywords, the website will lose its Google ranking position for those keywords, but the other keywords will remain untouched.
One cause of this could be so-called over-optimization, where pages have been optimized too much for certain keywords. Low-quality links or even the combination of both could lead to a penalty.
In addition, bad links can cause a penalty: directories or individual URLs will lose visibility.
Penalties in Google ranking can affect all companies that acquire customers via Google, since sites where an URL is entered directly into the browser are affected less often.
