Google's "Fred" update

Google rolled out another update to their ranking algorithm on March 8th that they dubbed "Fred", it's impossible to say 100% what exactly Fred changed, but based on the resulting articles up until now we can take an educated guess.

There's a ton of articles floating around right now about Fred, and they're all talking about pretty much the same thing - how Fred is targeting websites which focus on ads or placing excessive affiliate links, but it could be explained even easier...

Fred is targeting low quality websites focusing on generating revenue (focusing on the owner) rather than focusing on helping the readers. This is something Google's been trending towards for quite a while now and it's not really surprising to see them getting more aggressive about it.

That simply reiterates what's consistently been taught here at WA, for as long as I've been here at least; that's been a while now that I think about it... The consistent theme throughout training (in my understanding) is to focus on your readers, so as long as you're doing that then you'll be safe from this and potential future algorithm updates of the same nature. I guess it's safe to say that Kyle, Carson & Jay's training has been ahead of the game this whole time?

These algo updates aren't something to fret about usually, but they're definitely something to keep in mind. Sometimes they hit hard as is the case with Fred, luckily I was unaffected, but so far there's been a lot of websites claiming to have lost 50-90% of their traffic!

Just something to keep in mind :)