How to check if my website has been affected by the new Google Fred Update?

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  • SEO
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A new algorithm update has been released by Google during the past week, which has created a havoc in the world of SEO. Google has named it "Fred" unofficially as a joke. The new algorithm has affected a lot of websites and has caused a drastic drop in their ranking.

With such changes Fred is observed to be a link Quality algorithm update that evaluates a website on the basis of other websites that are pointing back to it. The fact that matters is not the number of backlinks but the quality of sites that reflects your link. In nutshell, it works on quality rather than quantity.

My website webuyanyticket.com had a very good ranking earlier and as the new algorithm was released the ranking dropped all of a sudden. I have tried all possible remedies to raise the ranking, but my efforts have gone in vain. It is quiet difficult to figure out that-Is it the effect of the new Fred Update?

If yes, kindly suggest any tool or other measures that can help me check that my website has been affected by the new Fred Update and how can I resolve the issue.
#affected #check #fred #google #update #website
  • Profile picture of the author savidge4
    The overall best advice.. read the Quality Rating Guidelines (QRG) http://static.googleusercontent.com/...guidelines.pdf
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    Success is an ACT not an idea
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  • Profile picture of the author EelKat
    FRED came out over a month ago, and it's not targeting links to your site, that would be Penguin that does that. What you are describing is Penguin not FRED. Google sends out Penguin every few weeks. If you got hit for backlinks, it was Penguin that hit your site not FRED.

    FRED targets only a small portion of sites, specifically targeting niche content sites, sites made up of articles, and blogs.It looks for AFFILIATE LINKS, count how many affiliate links you have in your article vs how many words long your article is.

    Sites that are getting hit hard by FRED are sites that feature a high rate of pages with fewer then 2,000 words per page.

    FRED unindexes pages with fewer then 400 words, and down ranks pages with fewer then 1,500 words; up boosts pages of 2,000+ words, and gives the rare few pages of 4,000+ words a super boost straight to the top.

    FRED has been "punishing" pages that contain 5 or more ads on them. (So if your 1,000 word article, has 3 AdSense ads and 2 Amazon links, it likely got unindexed)

    Panda targets spam, gibberish, spun content, scraped content, and duplicate content

    Penguin targets links, backlinks; quality vs quantity; it also looks in forum posts and if it sees you posting too many links to your own site in forum posts, it'll blacklist you for marketing spam

    Pigeon compares geographic locations, looks for contact info (phone number and address of web master and matches it with site owner WHOIS info), punishing sites that are "unknown" or "unlisted" and have no site owner contact info. If Pigeon can prove you are "local" it'll boost you in Google Maps results.

    RankBrain looks at Author Bios for REAL expert/authority (PhDs and colleges author attended)

    FRED looks specifically at word counts of the articles vs number of ads on the page, punishes "empty" pages, short pages, and pages with too many links to advertisers. The people hit hardest by FRED are the ones using banner ads.

    Hummingbird unindexes offenders the others blacklisted, if they go past 6 months without correcting the issues they were blacklisted for.

    There are about 200 others, but those are Google's "biggest" ones to keep track of. Google sends one out every week; and each one ends up going out in a rotation, so that each one does a run every 3 months (4 times a year).

    If your site has TRULY been blacklisted, check your email; Google ALWAYS makes an attempt to contact the site owner and let them know they are unindexing your site and that you have 90 days to correct the problem before unindexing you.... unless you got hit by Pigeon for not having contact info, in which case, Google will unindex you without sending you an email as they have no way to contact you if your WHOIS info is unknown or unlisted.

    Check your site traffic in Google Analytics and in Bing Analytics. Compare the two against each other. If you got hit by a Google Algorithm, your traffic from Bing will be steady while your Google traffic is sinking. If your traffic is dropping on Bing as well as on Google, then it was not a Google algorithm that hit you, but something else (seasonal traffic, holidays, etc.) that had nothing to do with Google.
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  • Profile picture of the author Miguel Portela
    The way you can see is using google webmaster tools and see if there are sudden drops of keywords.
    For my case it seams that fred add no effect at lest for now.
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  • Profile picture of the author Sclark
    You can use Webmaster Tools or Google Analytics or any ranking tool that has integration with those, and check if there were any dramatic ranking drops or organic traffic spikes - those would indicate some kind of issue. Then check the pages affected.

    Also, I`d recommend to have an overall look at your site and see if there are too many pages with obviously thin content - I`m usually using links on page / word count ratio for a quick detection.
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    • Profile picture of the author sparrow
      why are you worrying about any updates

      unless your pages are providing no value

      way too many of you worrying about things that really don't matter much these days

      rank brain is in control and give it what it wants RELEVANCY!
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  • Profile picture of the author paulgl
    Ridiculous thread. One can only suspect that having said domain for sale isn't doing anything, right? And advertising up front and center, won't matter either, right?

    Or perhaps just to get a possible sale from some unsuspecting warrior....

    You got hit with fred because you are a barney.

    Paul
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  • Profile picture of the author Indus Uno
    Check your webiste traffic from GA by comparing it with previous time period, this will give you the whole insight.
    now, under channels, organic, select 2nd dimension as landing page and compare it with prevoious period, the drop of any url will give you insigh of traffic drop, check the rank of these pages targeted keywords.
    Then, go to google search console and see its backlink and analyze each of backlink and if you find any of the bad link, send removal request to the site owner and submit these links for disavow.
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