Recover from Google Fred Update Penalty (Twice) – A Case Study
This website got hit by Fred twice. Read here for the detailed account of what I have done to recover my website from the Fred penalty.
Recently this very website experiences the dreaded Google Fred Penalty (not once but twice!) and the traffic was down by 90% in the most serious case. This was devastating to this website which starts out as a place to share my knowledge and thoughts about web development and experience in getting professional certifications (e.g. PMP, PMI-ACP®, ITIL®).
Below are the web and search analytics of the period from early March till early May 2017
Just as many other webmaster being hit by Google penalty would do, I couldn’t but keep asking the questions: “What have I done wrong?” and “What the hell is this Google Algorithm Update is about?”
The good news is it has almost recovered. Below is my detailed account of what I have done to recover from the Fred penalty. Hope this would be useful to other webmasters who are still struggling with Google Fred.
Article Highlights
Is the website really hit by Google Fred Penalty?
@rustybrick @i_praveensharma @JohnMu sure! From now on every update, unless otherwise stated, shall be called Fred
— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) March 9, 2017
From early March, there were massive shakeouts in search results rankings of a lot of websites and many suspected Google had rolled out a new form of update that would affect search engine result pages rankings. This website was initially left unharmed.
But beginning Mar 16, there was a sharp drop in Google referral traffic. There were virtually up to 90% less referral from Google and the rankings of my pages went beyond 100 in most cases (which essentially mean NO traffic at all).
“What have I done wrong?” — I actually did not make significant changes to the website in over two months’ time (just posting regularly), nothing new would trigger Google penalty with current algorithms. And as Google did not specifically disclose anything about the update, I could only make educated guess by correlating the time, seriousness, causes, etc. of the hit to that of other websites.
And it is quite logical to come to the conclusion that my website is being hit by the new Google algo update.
What went wrong?
Most info we will get about #google Fred update is it addresses something in the webmaster guidelines on quality. #smx
— Dustin Woodard (@webconnoisseur) March 23, 2017
I followed almost every tweet and post related to Google Fred during this period, trying to understand what the algo change was about and how to sort things out. The most popular hypotheses at that time were:
- Fred update targets websites with many pages containing a lot of advertisement, outdated, thin and scraped content and incomprehensible articles for SEO purposes (source)
- Fred update hits low-value content sites that focus on revenue, not users (source)
Later on, in the Google Webmaster hangout on 24 March, John Mueller revealed a bit more on the new Google algo update:
Essentially, if you are following the Google guidelines and you are doing things technically right, then that sounds to me like there might just be just quality issues with regards to your site. Things that you can improve overall when it comes to the quality of the site. (source)
“What the hell is this Google Algorithm Update is about?” — These all point to the fact that Google Fred is about website quality.
Nothing NEW indeed.
But that’s the most difficult situation to handle. Had I knew exactly something that I did wrong, I could amend it right away (though in many cases not easily). But if there is no need guidelines to follow, I just could not make sense of the situation.
What have I done WRONG the first time?
Quality, quality, quality…
And from what I have read from others, quality is virtually about everything.
I need to dig deeper.
As the “Fred Update” is concerned primarily about quality, according to past Google algo updates and by reading the Google Webmaster and Quality Rater Guidelines, I have decided to tackle the following aspects as my first attempt to recover from Fred:
- Advertising — reduced the number of Adsense ad from 3 to 0 and remove Amazon widget (I read from many blogs that removing all ads is not necessary, but since I badly want my website back in rankings, I decided to be drastic at first (same for below))
- Content value — going through all the recent blog posts by either
- combining posts that are similar in content focus (remember to 301 redirect the remove posts)
- enhancing post contents by adding additional content / insights
- updating post published more than 2 years ago with latest figures and facts
- editing the post contents as natural as possible (e.g. by including alternate forms of the keywords)
- removing duplicate contents technically and the “tags” pages
- removing many of the Q&A pages which are all quite short
- Page layout
- reducing almost half of the links on each pages by doing away with “recent comment widgets”, “recent posts widgets”, etc. (just the recommended articles widgets there now).
- Technical SEO
- fixing as many errors reported in Google Webmaster account as possible — I feel that this is extremely important
- Internal links — going through each post and interlink to other posts on the website that would give additional insights on the topic discussed. I especially focussed on reducing the bounce rate with this step.
- Backlinks — asked to remove / disavowed website backlinks from domains with low authority or spamming records, in particular those gained between Feb and Apr this year
- Affiliate links — reduced the total number of affiliate links on my website
- (page) Authority — as the website was changed to https from http in early Feb, I suspect this maybe one of the causes. I try to tweak the addthis widget to get the Facebook share counts from the http URL — but I would not suggest others to do this…
- (my) Authority — participated in many discussion forums and groups (e.g. LinkedIn, Quora, Facebook) by contributing my knowledge and expertise to help other web developers and certification aspirants
- Website speed — my WordPress website makes use of a caching plugin which needs a special setting for https (which I did not know) and my site speed slowed down almost by half when I made the conversion to https. My solution? Switch to another caching plugin (WP Super Cache) that works faultlessly with https.
Note: you may also follow through these steps if your website rankings have disappeared.
It felt like forever but the recovery took 3 weeks’ time. Thanks God. But…
What have I done WRONG the second time?
After seeing the recovery in Google referral traffic, I thought I need to continually enhance the quality of the website. And this time, I decided a bold move to go to AMP as AMP is highly advocated by Google. I hoped this would move my website into the “safe” zone even more.
And as soon as the AMP pages are on line, my website was punished again!
The figure below shows the number of AMP pages and errors in those pages detected:
The two lines are not plotted on the same scale. There were several hundred AMP pages detected with only around 12 pages with error. But it seems that this kind of error is enough to send a “low quality signal” to Fred though. My website was begin punished again.
Another tough war to fight:
- Removed all the AMP tags and codes — it was also discovered that the bounce rate of AMP pages were much much higher than the responsive website pages (sometimes even 100%), and that is why I do not implement AMP now
- Continued participating in forums and groups
- Continued updating website contents to make them more valuable and fresh
and waited for around 3 weeks to see rankings and referral traffics coming back.
Why 3 weeks in both cases? I have no idea at all.
Update: Some websites have said that Google refresh the Fred algo once or twice every month to revisit the penalized websites to re-assess if the penalties are to be lifted. Probably that’s the underlying reason.
My two cents on what Fred is
With the experience of being hit by Fred twice in a row, I would highly suspect that Fred is indeed nothing new — it does not target new metrics that are not in Google algo before. The following are still very important:
- Freshness
- Panda (thin content)
- Penguin (backlinks related)
- Panda
- Mobile-Friendly
- Top Heavy (ad heavy)
- Payday (money earning affiliate)
But Fred is likely to be a combination of all these signals to give a “threshold-type” penalty. That means if a spammy website that can luckily survive many or all of the above Google penalties with a thin margin, Fred now comes to the party to do the maths on all these signals and come up with a final quality score. It has the final say on whether the website is a spam or not by giving out the life threatening penalty.
Just my guess. Of course, it is likely that I have guessed Fred wrong.
Anyway, I am thankful that my website has now recovered (from Fred?).
Hi there,
I am desperate for some help as my site impression from Google Search has dropped from 13000 per day to 2 or 3 per day. I really don’t know what happened! Then I read your blog it suggested that you turned off Google Adsense which made me think the time my impression started to drop was around the time I activated Google Adsense! So you suggesting that by having Google Adsense will dramatically decrease my Google search presence? Would be great if you can please enlighten me since I am finding it really hard to troubleshoot my problem.
Also AMP greatly increased by Google Mobile page speed (around 60) vs my usual responsive design which gets me about 20/100. Bare in mind my desktop speed is around 95, so I am kind of confused at what I should be using as faster mobile speed should increase my ranking?
Thank you. I would really appreciate your help.
Google ranking is indeed a complicated matter. There is not a single explanation that fits all. My advice is to try doing all sorts of things in the RIGHT way and let Google recognize it. Thanks!
Hi, Edward.
My blog has constantly been experiencing a decline in traffic and rankings since last year up till this year being 2018. I have tried removing contents I consider to be thin (precisely news related contents) and I have also tried building ‘quality’ links all these while but none seem to be helping. Realized that whenever I change the domain, traffic and rankings pick up and in a space of 2 weeks or there about, they drastically reduce again bringing the daily views to what it was before switching domain. I have done this twice and the results aren’t different.
SO now, I have drastically reduced the ads from the mobile version of the page from around 8 to just 2. Hoping to see if that’s the culprit which for some reason, I tend to doubt. Reason being that, the content on the blog are usually long. More of them are about 600 words each. I am not sure having just 2 ads within such content will work fine. It’d be nice to get your opinion on that. More so, what’s the minimum number of words in an article would you consider as quality content?
Sorry to learn that your website is experiencing some issues with Google. Actually, I just tried everything listed there and did not know which one “clicked” with Google. You may try harder to “upgrade” your articles and maybe you may see an approval from Google soon. All the best!
Hi.
I was having some of the page whic rank in SERP at rank 1 position and for 4-5days i get huge traffic but suddenly those pages so no where on search results when i am using the same keyword for searching it.
I am getting feed up and dont why why this happens everytime to use.
Do the ranking also effect by using popunders ads and i also want to tell you that my bounce rate is arount 55%
Sorry to hear that. Yes, Google ranking is affected by a lot of factors. Popunder ads are one of the factors. However, I see that your bounce rate is quite okay indeed. Really don’t know why this would happen. Perhaps you have to wait a bit more time for Google to settle on the ranking for your keywords. Thanks!
I deleted ALL affiliate links, added new content, improved speed, I havent much backlinks, but I disavowed links from doorways etc, and nothing have changed.
Hi Chilloutboy,
One has to wait until the next refresh of Google search rankings when Google pushed a new update to the search algorithm. Please be patient. If your website is of high quality, Google will reward it!
Recently my website rank for certain keywords dropped a whole lot e.g:- 3-256 , 2-207, 10- 277.
Can this be done because of fred too?
And i checked my site is indexed on google but my brand disappeared from google.
Judged with the facts you have provided alone, it is highly likely that your website is considered poor in quality by Google (maybe because of Fred or other Google penalties). Work hard on improving the content quality and your website will bounce back!
My site is also penalized by Fred Update. I have removed bad backlinks, removed all the affiliate links, decreased the adsense ad ratio from 3 to 1 ad per page, removed all the low quality pages, tags and categories from Google index but still my site is not recovered. Please guide me so I can also recover my site.
Thanks
If you have gone through the steps I outlined above, it is only a matter of time for Google to recrawl your site to determine that the quality has improved. Let’s wait and see. Wish you luck!
Thanks mate my site has been recovered. I am very happy.
Great! Glad to know that your site has recovered. This is a further proof that the most recent Google update aims at raising the quality of the websites (whether technical or content). We need to work harder to maintain the quality of our websites in order to appear in Google search results.
My blog was in the first position, after the update I got to position 12. I did everything you said in this article Edward, I hope to regain control as soon as possible. Thanks for the shared tips! 🙂
Can you update whats the current status. its fully recovered or not?
Yes, this website has fully recovered to previous traffic volume.