What is a Google “Penalty”?

[riprook7]

What is a Google “Penalty”?

[moglix]

A Google Penalty is the negative impact on any Website's Search Engine Ranking Position impact based on updation released by Google in their search algorithms and/or manual review.

Reason of Penalty are...
Buying Backlinks from Bad Sites
Duplicate Content
Keyword Stuffed Content

The list of reasons are more, we can prevent to be penalized by using pure while had seo techniques.

[ritika.patel]

If any website use the black hat SEO technique to optimize its ranking, traffic or other activity which is against the Google's policy, Than Google penalty the website and send to the sendbox.

[ShreyaKoushik]

A Google penalty means your site is either no longer listed on search results, or that your ranking for your targeted keywords has dropped dramatically. When your site gets a Google penalty, your target audience can't find you. And when you are invisible to your target audience, your traffic, and ultimately revenue, drops.
Through Website penalty checker, you can check your domain is penalised or not.

[ram.sh]

Google Penalty is the negative impact for the website search rankings based on google's algorithm or updates.

[Jennifer Martin]

What is a Google “Penalty”?

Decrease in the website traffic and ranking in Google search result is termed as Google Penalty. Basically, any website, which breaches Google guidelines are Penalized by Google.

[learn2do]

There are two main penalties you can get. The first one is a manual action from Google's spam team, and the second one is an algorithmic penalty. Foturnately, a website with penalty could be recovered.

[rahul3214]

Google penalty means if you use keyword stuffing, doorway page, make negative backlinks.

[seomarqetrix]

Google penalty means if you use duplicate content, keyword stuffing, doorway page this is negative backlinks that called google penalty.

[Alpha Men]

If your website traffic suddenly drops and you see a corresponding decline in rankings, there is a good possibility that you are on the receiving end of a Google penalty

[brknny]

If the websites violates search engine guidelines while promoting their website through online marketing by following black hat seo techniques then google penalize the website owner by deindexing the webpage and sometimes it completely remove the website from their database.This can be identified through analytics and webamsters.You can identify it,if you observe sudden drop in your website traffic,sudden drop of keyword ranking positions and many more.

[Sonika11Mehra]

I dont have any idea about the answer myself until i checked this out :
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/10-ways-to-diagnose-a-google-penalty/10566/

[raheel]

Nice Answer @Shreya

[sachinkumar12]

A Google penalty is the negative impact on a website's search rankings based on updates to Google's algorithm update or an intentional penalization for various black-hat SEO techniques.

[Sonika11Mehra]

Google owe their position as the world’s top search engine to a history of delivering the most relevant and useful search results. Their motivation to serve the best results is reflected in constant tweaking of the algorithm which controls which websites are prominently positioned.

[willykevin1]

If your website traffic suddenly drops and you see a corresponding decline in rankings, there is a good possibility that you are on the receiving end of a Google penalty

[Bluesky94]

A Google penalty is the negative impact on a website's search rankings based on updates to Google's search algorithms and/or manual review. The penalty can be an unfortunate by-product of an algorithm update or an intentional penalization for various black-hat SEO techniques.