Some will love him, some will hate him… Fact is that Fred is here, and he is here to stay 🙂
In case you don’t know Fred yet, let me introduce him to you. In short: Fred is Google’s latest update. And he is shaking up Google rankings big time, affecting rankings for a lot of pages and websites.
So, what does Fred do and why is he here?
As always Google is not releasing any information on updates. But by not denying it, they are confirming that something big has changed in the past days. And we are not talking about the minor changes that Google is making every day (on average 3 changes per day). So there is no exact details on what Fred does. But a lot of SEO and ranking monitoring services have been seeing huge fluctuations in Google rankings. Stormy weather in SEO land! When digging deeper and trying to find out what Fred is all about, it turns out that Fred seems to be affecting sites that have been doing Black Hat SEO stuff, but probably also other factors affect the ranking of sites. So it seems that Fred is a friend of the well known Penguin and trying to remove webspam. If this is true, your site’s ranking might be impacted in a negative way if there is external “spammy” links. Of course, it will also work the other way around: when these sites are removed from the search results, your site might rise in Google rankings 🙂
[update 24 March 2017: there is a confirmation by Google that there has been an update. It should affect sites with (very) low quality content that is merely aimed at clickbaiting.Having (a lot of) affiliate links to your site should not be an issue.]
What do we see?
We ran a quick analysis of the 1000’s of Pagetrackers that our Textmetrics customers have running. These pagetrackers are tracking Google rankings and include a wide variety of domains, keywords and types of websites – from very small to very big, from blogging to webshops, from corporate websites to personal blogs. By looking at the rankings, we can confirm that we also see extreme fluctuations: some pages that were in top 10 positions are dropping even out of top 100, and also the other way around, pages moving in Top 100 or moving more than 50 positions. What this means for the website traffic? Check the SEO Calculator to find out.
Is Fred affecting your website?
If you already had pagetracking in place, you can check your pagetrackers to see if this update has affected your rankings. If you don’t have them set up, you could consider setting them up to monitor from now on. In order to set up, just login into Textmetrics and open the page you would like to monitor (or create a new page). On top of your page are 2 green buttons, press the left (with the graph) and start monitoring! Of course, it’s also a good idea to take a look at your website analytics: what is happening to your organic traffic?
Sign up for a free Textmetrics trial account: find the best keywords, optimize your content and track your rankings!