We know Google can check if a site is penalized or not. Google has told webmasters in real time if they are penalized many many times.
We even saw what Google calls the Google Penalty Server.
Google's John Mueller finally spoke more about this server, at least, I am assuming that is what he references when he talks about Google's own internal diagnosis tools. He mentioned it twice in the Google+ Hangout Friday.
First he mentioned it at 22:52 and then again at 44:18.
Here is the transcript of those mentions:
Question:
There is some kind of operating system that you or a proper Google engineer can access and, for example: apply some algorithmic change on a very specific geo location?
Answer:
I am not really sure what you mean there with the question.I guess it is really not an operating system in that regard, and it is not the case where we would apply specific algorithms to specific locations. Because we do try to make our algorithms such that they work everywhere. For us, that is the most efficient way to work. That we have one algorithm that works across all locations, across all kinds of web sites, than that makes it a lot easier.
But we do for example have debugging tools to help us understand what is happening in specific search results, in specific locations, So it is more that we can kind of look into those search results to see this went wrong here or in this specific location someone has to work on improving this algorithm, or maybe to catch these kind of corner cases better. But that is more from a monitoring and debugging point of view and not such that we would push specific changes.
Video:
Question:
As a Google worker, do you have direct access to check if a site is penalized with any algo? there is some kind of Operating system that you guys use where you can access to a complete site profile, including penalizations?
Answer:
So I kind of touched upon this earlier, we do have various tools to diagnosis what’s happening there, to diagnosis how sites are standing in search, to double check to see if things are working as they should be working.So we do need to have these kind of tools because we would just have a black box on our side, and not really know what is happening there.
Video:
So, Google's John Mueller said they can't have a black box on their side around why a site is impacted in a negative way by a Google algorithm. It makes sense. But when it comes to webmasters getting an automated action viewer, that is something not coming anytime soon.
Forum discussion at Google+ Hangout.
