The Google Fred update has to do with penalizing content driven sites that are too inundated with ads and motivated by driving ad revenue where they become troublesome for users trying to view content.

There are no exact details on what Fred does, but a lot of SEO and ranking monitoring services have been seeing huge fluctuations in Google rankings. We’ve also seen more chatter and reports of changes from within the “black hat” SEO community, which usually means that it’s a spam algorithm update around links.

More precisely, Google Fred Update reprimands sites that are filled with ads and focus on bringing in ad revenue which makes it complicated for users trying to view content. In other words, it looks like Fred is Penguin’s friend and is trying to remove webspam.

Furthermore, Fred is targeting low quality websites that focus on ads (generating revenue) or placing excessive affiliate links which usually means that they are focusing on the owner rather than focusing on helping readers.

What are ad heavy low quality content sites?

These sites are created to maximize revenue by gaining lots of web traffic with main objective to getting the user to click on an ad or an affiliate link. They usually have these points in common:

• An unnatural percentage of prominent ads or affiliate links within the content and around the site. If you place too many ads at the top of your web page, users will find it difficult to find the actual content and will have a bad experience. In other words, users want to see the content right away and not have to scroll down.

 → consequence: If you have too much advertising content “above-the-fold”, you will be affected by the Google Fred Update and your site will not rank as highly going forward.

• Content is text based and in article form meaning you’re unlikely to see original video content on these sites.

→ consequence: Lacking of a consistent and integrated content strategy can affect your rankings. We all know that creative and unique content can seriously boost your website visibility.

• Includes too many PBNs (private blog network) links

→ consequence: For most SEOs, PBNs are a way to create backlinks for their money sites. It’s usually used by “back hats SEO” that want to maximize whatever loophole there is in Google’s algorithm. It’s clearly not the way to win Google’s love.

• Sites with poor silo structure.

→ consequence: Siloing a website serves to clarify your website’s subject relevance. If Google’s bot can’t understand quickly what your site is all about, it’s going to hurt your rankings.

• Site is usually tailored towards generating revenue as opposed to solving a user’s search query.

→ consequence: if your website’s #1 goal is to generate revenue, it can possibly be seen as a spammy site by the Google bots.

What you should do if your site is hitten by Google Fred Update?

According to SE Roundtable, some sites reported over a 50% drop in traffic due to the Fred penalty. Your site might of been impacted in a negative way if it contained too many external spammy links or other way around, your site might of received a little raise in Google rankings due to the massive clean out.

If you want to have Fred on your side, we suggest you to adjust your site with these quick tips:

• If you run a blog, remove tag pages (often forgotten by webmasters and still indexed by Google which offers no extra value. If done properly, your site can fully recover its original traffic);
• Visually appealing website for your users, not for search engine robots (internal coding and visual appearance of a website play an important role in SEO);
• Write specific content designed to solve a particular user search query (try to stay away from broad and generic titles – i.e “easy bathroom decorating tricks” VS “ Decorating ideas designed for bathroom”);
• Check your ad ratio to ensure it’s well balanced (ask yourself, “can you see more than 1 ad when viewing site? Is the user distracted by the ads above my content? – these questions will help you in knowing whether you have too many ads or not);
• Try not to publish duplicate content (duplicate content is leading to SEO issues penalizing your rankings. It refers to content that appears in more than one place on a website. It causes troubles to crawlers since it’s impossible to tell which piece is more relevant than the other for a given query);
• Focus on users rather than stuffing keyword strategies;
• Include other forms of content such as videos/gifs, etc.;
• Create a social following (Building a social following attracts a real community and ‘likes’ by sharing valuable content in your business sector).

Read more  Good suggestions to know Google Fred Penalty

_______________________________________________________________________________

For more details about our seo service packages, pls contact us

BIGBIGSEO Team

Email: bigbigseo@gmail.com
Skype: bigbigseo
https://www.facebook.com/bigbigseo

Thank you!