How Do You Identify the Cause of a Penalty?

[dewalds86]

I would like to know what steps you need to take in order to find out what what penilty your website has been hit with.

Just to be clear I am not talking about manual penilties that you can check in google search console. I am specifically refering to google algorithm updates.

For example if you have been hit by panda how would you identify and fix it.

[Fli]

Here is quite nice infographics which can help you to discover whether your site was hit by Panda or Penguin update:
http://searchengineland.com/figz/wp-content/seloads/2014/11/Panda-Penguin-Flow-Chart.jpg
It seems to be about Google Analytics and if you see traffic drop from Google around the date Google animal (Panda..) was applied, it can be you were affected.
Also Google: hit by panda discover