NO TRAFFIC LOST AFTER FRED UPDATE! WHAT HAPPENED WITH YOU?

Same for me.

By quite a lot actually.

My site was averaging 3,000 hits a month (pretty standard for the niche, {Sissification CBT Yaoi Unicorn Porn} which is super small and only has an estimated 7,000 die hard followers world wide) and suddenly I've got traffic coming out the wazooo. Just checked my Google Analytics, so I could give you an exact number for this comment... as of right now, 5 seconds ago, my traffic this month so far is: 75,962

That's insane. To go from 3,000 views a month to 75k after one Google update.... I don't even know what to think. This genre/topic/niche just doesn't get traffic like this, it simply doesn't happen. I mean, at 3k a month I was ranking the #1 most trafficked site of the niche, and now it's just gone ZOOM waaaaay over the top of anything reasonably expected for the topic.

I'm just sitting here eating marshmallow bunnies and wondering: is this a fluke or will this trend continue into the rest of the year? I can only wait and see.

I'm not entirely sure the full details of it yet, as it just happened March 8, 2017 so not a lot of research has been done into it yet. All that is really known is that is seems to have targeted affiliate sites - cutting traffic off almost entirely, from any "content site" that has HEAVY focus on affiliate links, with only minimal "content"

In other words, sites that post a 400 word "article" followed by several product links to Amazon, saw their traffic go from 1,000+ visits a day to ZERO visits at all - NONE - not even one - meaning Google unindexed their urls - blacklisted them, removed them from the search engine entirely.

On the other hand ACTUAL content sites, with articles 2,000+ words long, and only a single affiliate link here or there, suddenly saw 10s of 1,000s of page views overnight. With some sites going from 10 or 12 visits a day to 10,000+ visits a day.

Things have gone crazy right now for anyone with a content focused, topic based, affilate monetized website (which is what I do, thus why my site was one of the one's effected by FRED)

Near as I can tell, from what I've seen on my own site, what my fellow SBIers are saying is going on with their sites, and what Amazon storefront owners are saying is going on with their sites (I'm on several small forums for these types of sites, so I'm seeing a lot of chatter - good and bad - from pretty much every one with an affiliate monetized, article based, niche-topic content site, right now)... near as I can tell the ONLY sites effects are content sites (which includes blogs, Amazon stores, SBI sites, and similar sites) that are posting daily articles, with heavy keyword focus, and are using affilates.

From what I'm seeing, it looks like big articles, long articles, 2,000+ word counts are "IN" and being given a heavy boost; while small articles, short articles, articles under 1,000 words are being penalized.

Along side of, sites focused on affiliate marketing with LOTS of "buy this" content, being punished heavily; while sites with only minimal links and more focus on writing long content with a lot of information, are being given a boost.

FRED clearly is targeting affiliate sites and content sites and any site focused on writing articles to promote traffic to product sales.

Basically, what happened was nearly all the losers were very advertisement heavy, especially banner ads, and offered little or poor quality content, which had no value for the reader. While all the winners were putting content over monetization.

It is very obvious that the sites hit hard by this had a lot of advertisement, outdated, thin and scraped content, a lot of spun content, a lot of not original content, and did not care about giving any real information to the viewer, caring only about getting clicks on their affiliate links.

And from the amount of sites effected... it appears to be one of Google's biggest updates ever, rivaling Panda's 2012 update that mass attacked content farms and resulted in places like Associated Content, Squidoo, and Yahoo Voices being shut down.

What is Google FRED update telling us? What we already knew to begin with: CONTENT IS KING!

Why did my site get a boost? Because in 6,000 pages I haven't got one article with fewer then 3,000 words, several are over 10,000 words and my most trafficked pages have 20,000 words per article. At the same time only 1 in every 10 or so pages has an affiliate link on it. My site is focused largely on sharing information. I'm not pushing products or focusing on squeeze pages or trying to get people to buy anything. And THAT is what Google wants. Information for people with questions, seeking answers.