Say Hello To Google’s Fred – The Friend Of Good Websites

As sure as night follows day, one Google algorithm update follows another in order to keep ahead of the “black hat” brigade of SEO pirates. But a recent round of changes is causing some significant loss of visibility for a large number of websites.

If you’re a webmaster, should you be worried by Google’s algorithm update? If you’re playing by Google’s rules and being fair to your website audience, then no.

Who, or what is Google Fred?

The experts at Google routinely adapt the search algorithms that rank websites on their search engine results page (SERP) to make sure that users can find material relevant to their search.

But as Google gets smarter, SEO practitioners also adapt. The ethical ones use intelligent, honest methods to help searchers find their websites; others, frankly, push a website higher up the rankings by cheating, for the purpose of taking as much money off visitors as possible.

So, every so often, Google launches a whole package of updates, moving their goalposts to reward the worthy websites and penalising the ones trying to play the system. These exotically-named updates have included Google “Panda”, rolled out between 2011 and 2013, and “Penguin”, launched in 2012.

But since Google rolled out it’s more prosaically named “Fred” updates in March, the fallout has been anything but dull; a large number of websites have plummeted in Google’s search rankings.

Google is understandably cagey about the details, but the websites hit by Fred tend to have one thing in common: they all offer little or poor quality content, with no value to the reader, while attempting to “convert” them as quickly as possible.

Spam, spam and more spam on the menu

These “spammy” websites use aggressive “black hat” SEO techniques focusing on satisfying search engines rather than a human audience. Although this goes against the good practices promoted in Google’s webmaster guidelines, the problem has been getting steadily worse.

Spamming tactics include:

• Stuffing content with keywords, sometimes as hidden text.
• Cloaking (offering up one website page for search engines while misdirecting visitors to an entirely different page or site).
• Too many low-quality backlinks.
• Pages heavy with advertising, particularly banner ads.

Content is King

Personally, I’m delighted that Google is coming down hard on “black” hat SEO practices. They are trying promoting a more ethical approach, punishing websites that deliberately dupe their audiences.

I pride myself on the fact that the websites I support don’t just tick boxes for the benefit of search engines but deliver what the searcher really wants. In order to do that, I believe the key is good content:

• The right mix of copy content, imagery and video appropriate for the subject matter, in order to create a better visitor experience.
• Original and relevant content that isn’t duplicated.
• Regularly updated copy that delivers accurate information that the searcher expects to find.
• Relevant backlinks from sites with high domain authority.

If you’d like to learn more about how your website can better serve your audience and earn the SERP ranking it deserves, please contact Digital-Blah or ring us on 07725 129058.