How do you know if your website has been penalised or not?

[stephang]

How do you know if your website has been penalised or not? Do you go way way down in SERP or do you disappear completely?

Thanks.

[tedster]

If some (or all) previously well-ranked keywords drop significantly, that's a penalty. If your urls disappear completely, as in site:example.com returns zero results, then that's a ban.