Barry Schwartz says, “Last week, we reported about a new unconfirmed Google ranking update that is going by the name of Fred. Google has not confirmed this update. In fact, they told us they have no comment at all on this.

That being said, I spent the weekend collecting sample URLs of webmasters who claimed to have been hit by this update. After reviewing now upward of 100 different sites, I believe this update targets low-value content sites that put revenue above helping their users.

The vast majority of URLs shared with me all show the same type of website. A content site, often in a blog format, but not always, that has content on various topics — which looks to be written for ranking purposes and then has ads and/or affiliate links sprinkled throughout the article. Many of these sites are not industry expert sites, but rather they seem to have content on vast array of topics that are not adding all that much value above what other sites in the industry have already written.

All these sites saw 50 percent to 90 percent traffic declines from Google organic search. This was a massive organic ranking drop for these sites.

In many cases, the content is wrapped around ads, where often the ads are a bit hard to differentiate from the content”.

Did Google’s Fred update hit low-value content sites that focus on revenue, not users?

Search Engine Land

Sharing is caring