Google Fred Update

Marketers and content producers are aware that the quality of their content isn’t everything when it comes to marketing online. As well as creating high-quality, engaging and on-brand content, businesses have to be aware of the systems by which search engines sort and present web content, based on their specific set of rules.

With Google, the dominant search engine on the world wide web, it is essential that businesses and content creation agencies are aware of the firm’s rules when it comes to grading and sorting content. These rules can be found within Google’s Webmaster Quality Guidelines – though this is a dense and often impenetrable document.

One of the recent updates – dubbed ‘Fred’ – has changed the rules when it comes to marketing your material online, and being A-rated and boosted up in Google’s search engine rankings. As such, this piece focuses on the implications of this update for all firms sharing content on the internet.

What is Fred?

The ‘Fred’ is so-named after a tweet sent by one of Google’s engineers. In the tweet, the Google employee joked that all updates made from a specific date should be called Fred. Despite the light-hearted tone of his tweet, the name stuck – and marketing agencies ever since have been using the term ‘Fred’ as a catch-all for Google’s string of content guideline updates. Fred is not just a new algorithm or a new set of rules – it is everything Google chooses to change in their content ranking system.

While the name may be a joke, its effects are certainly no joke. Ordinarily, when Google changes the rules of the digital marketing and SEO game, brands suffer. And that is precisely what happened in 2017 when the first wave of changes came into place. Companies had to adapt, and quick, to adjust their sites and maintain their traffic.

sure! From now on every update, unless otherwise stated, shall be called Fred

— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (@methode) March 9, 2017

Understanding Fred

For those who are in-the-know about SEO and content marketing, the changes brought about by Fred came as no surprise. If anything, Fred doubled down on some of the critical features of the Google rules and algorithms that we saw taking root in the early years of SEO. Some of these include:

• Less value placed on low-value content that’s deemed unoriginal and uninformative
• Less value placed on websites with dozens of adverts and many affiliate linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages.
• The higher value placed on those sites that generate original and informative content
• A higher value placed on those websites that are less clearly ‘playing the system’ created by Google

So, with this in mind, let us take a more in-depth look at what changes Fred has brought to the table in terms of how we should all be formatting our content.

What the Fred Update Hates

The Google Fred update 2017 hit several websites and blogs hard. These pages and sites found that something that they were doing wasn’t to the taste of the all-encompassing Fred. One of the things they found out, on making adjustments to their websites, was that adverts rank them lower. By removing adverts – or taking a few of them down – they found their traffic and performance rose quickly to recover from the initial shock of lost traffic.

So, adverts constitute one element of what makes a website rank lower on Google following their Fred update. Further, those websites that generate revenue from affiliate links – another common way to make cash on the internet – found that Fred was not impressed with their sites. They ranked lower and lost traffic. When these sites stopped misusing affiliate links, they found their traffic boosted back up. Of course, affiliate links are still incredibly important for brands and businesses online. That’s why Click Intelligence offers link building services to help you respond to the Fred updates – maintaining those links without losing out to the new algorithms.

What the Fred Update Loves

Of course, Fred isn’t an all-hating compilation of rules and algorithms. There are various ways to appease the beast that Google let free in 2017 – and more and more, over the intervening years, expert SEO companies such as Click Intelligence have made it their job to find out what makes Fred tick.

Possibly Fred’s most-loved attribute in published web content is originality. That means that all of your content ought to be new (not copied) and stable (with quotes, links, and formatting layers to help the reader navigate pages). Remember that the Fred updates were conceived to help web users, not businesses. Google’s value is in providing a search engine service – if they fail to show the right sites to web users, these users will migrate to other search engine providers.

With that in mind, you should always be devising new ways in which you can play the Fred updates at their own game, bringing in the quality content that your readers love, and using it to boost you higher in Google’s search results.

What Fred Means Today

The implications and repercussions of Fred have been far-reaching and fascinating. For many SEO companies and websites, the rules of the game changed permanently, and revenues on the internet changed forever.

The critical message that Fred sent out to websites and businesses online was simple: do not abuse our content guidelines, because we will change the rules of the game, leading you to lose out in the long run. This effectively means that cheap click-farms, spam websites, and shell sites are all a little closer to being consigned to the past. Importantly, Google’s guidelines regarding content have stayed consistent throughout all of these changes: they’re not moving the goalposts, they’re just strengthening the discipline of the referee.

So, dubious link buildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs. websites will do you no good in the modern era of SEO marketing – and nor will featuring many adverts on your websites, and spamming keywords to draw unwitting web users to your website. Now, you need to stay relevant, and a little more dignified, in your web content.

Making High-Quality Content Post-Fred

With all of the above in mind, there are some essential SEO tips that Click Intelligence can offer companies looking to adhere to these new standards and make the most of the level playing field created by the ongoing Google updates. You should always produce content that:

• Is directly related to your website, your brand, or your products
• Is informative and exciting, with views of experts and links to high-quality material included
• Is composed of a variety of media – from text to hyperlinks to pictures and even gifs
• Is correctly formatted for publishing, so that Google’s crawlers know how to assess each piece
• Adheres to the content guidelines shared by Google

If your content is ticking all the boxes outlined above, you should be well-aligned with the Fred updates, enabling you to continue experiencing high traffic to your website, using keywords and SEO techniques to build out your viewer base in the future.

SEO in 2020

So, you’ve learned about the repercussions of a 2017 update to Google’s algorithms, and how it impacts upon your own website, and the content you publish there. For those publishing content in 2020, and into 2021, this is essential information that will guide your SEO strategy in the future.

Don’t forget, too, that if content guidelines provided by Google feel a little dense to you, our team of SEO experts are on hand to give you advice, and offer our range of services, to get your Fred-friendly, and your content well-vetted, before you publish on your site.