How Fred may be affecting traffic to your website

EVERY year, Google changes its search algorithm about 600 times. Although most of these changes are insignificant to advertisers and brands, occasionally there are major algorithmic updates that rock the industry. These changes can be potential gamechangers for brands and also significantly impact a site’s ranking. You can call the latest update Fred. For now.

Although Google remains vague about the focus of this update is, Fred has been around long enough to gauge its potential implications.

Some research has shown that the update has affected the traffic and raking of sites that depend heavily on multiple longtail keywords and if the content that matches those keywords was written before 2014.Basically, if Fred identifies the content of any site as low quality, outdated or too ad-heavy, the site is guaranteed to see a massive drop in its ranking. The update has also clamped down on backlinks to old content. Since a low number of backlinks and low-quality content often go hand in hand, it is difficult to determine which factor is driving the change in rankings.

Change is the only constant in search engine optimisation. So let’s embrace Google’s latest update, learn from it, and be better at what we do.