The site literally jumped 125% overnight (and this isn’t a small site with a minimal amount of traffic). It was a surge so strong that it would make any SEO smile. Traffic levels I haven’t seen in a long time… Is this going to last?” When Fred rolled out, it didn’t take long for the site owner to reach out to me in a state of Google excitement. It has surely seen its share of ups and downs based on major algorithm updates. It’s a site I’ve helped extensively over the years from a quality standpoint, since it had been impacted by Panda and Phantom in the past. The first example covers an amazing case study. With that quick intro out of the way, let’s hop into specific examples of impact from the 3/7/17 update. You can read my two-part series about Phantom to learn more about what I’ve seen while helping companies with major core ranking updates focused on quality. For example, thin content, low quality content, UX barriers, mobile problems, aggressive monetization, aggressive affiliate setups, and more. There are many “low quality user engagement” problems that can cause damage. But as Barry pointed out, that’s not the only factor when it comes to major core ranking updates focused on quality. Many sites that were aggressively monetizing content at the expense of users got hit hard.īarry Schwartz covered that heavily in his post about Fred and I agree it was a strong factor.
Well, Fred seemed to pump up the volume when it comes to aggressive monetization. If you’ve read my previous posts about Google’s major core ranking updates, you will see many mentions of aggressive monetization, advertising overload, etc. We’ll jump into those cases after a quick introduction to Fred.įred – A Major Core Ranking Update Tied To QualityĪfter Fred rolled out, it was clear that it was a significant core ranking update tied to quality. The examples I’m providing in this post include a major recovery (a site surging 125% overnight), a large-scale site that has been in the gray area of Google’s quality algorithms for a long time, and then a third site that got absolutely smoked by Fred (losing nearly 70% of its Google organic traffic since Fred rolled out). Instead, I wanted to provide three specific examples of impact from the Fred update. There have been a number of posts written about the 3/7 update already, and my goal isn’t to rehash those findings.
So it was clear that Google pushed a big update. I’ve received many emails and calls from site owners that were impacted. Some sites lost 50-60% of their Google organic traffic overnight (with some losing up to 90%). Google finally confirmed the update, which is great, but there was so much obvious impact that a confirmation almost wasn’t necessary. It was named Fred (unfortunately) and there was quite a bit of controversy surrounding the update.
That’s when a major algorithm update rolled out that impacted many sites across the web. Mawill not be forgotten any time soon (at least for SEOs).
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