Case Study: How the FRED update changed the linking game and how to succeed in 2017 !

Overview:

I am running a couple of Web 2.0 properties for intelligence purposes, to monitor the changes
during ranking updates and adapt my link building strategies for money sites accordingly.
Today, I wanna share with you some of the insights I gathered during the ranking updates on 7th February and 8 March 2017 and how to adapt your strategeties for a post FRED world.

Settings:

For this reason I am gonna compare the ranking performance of two of my properties ranking with complete spam and what changed during the updates.

Property 1: Wordpress Blog (TF 4/CF 12) with 4, 750 word articles and 5 social bookmark (********) links ranking 2nd position at most and 5th position prior to update for low competition keyword, 1.900 monthly searches, keyword difficulty 15 by kwrevealer

Property 2: Tumblr Blog (TF 0/CF 19), 1000 Quotes, 1-2 lines, 350 nofollow links from other tumblrs (nofollow). Again ranking for low competition keyword, 2.900 monthly searches, difficulty 15 by kwrevealer. Prior the update the tumblr was indexed but nowhere to be shown in SERPs.


Observations:

During the updates on 7th Feb. and 8.th March, the positioning of both Web 2.0 turned by 180 degrees.While the Febr. 7th update kicked the wordpress blog from page 1, the tumblr showed up on page 3.

During Fred it became even worse. The Wordpress property got hit badly, went down to page 3-4 and finally disappeared from SERPS. The tumblr property soared and made it to page 1.

Major Findings:

- Social Bookmark Sites got hit badly during the update
As I checked through Semrush, the reason for the ranking change was, that the social bookmark sites the links came from, got utterly and perfectly destroyed during the Update, loosing 98% of their traffic.So the simply sent their penalty straight down the line to my web 2.0

- Nofollow Links increased in value:
The tumblr blog had nothing but nofollow links from other tumblr, nevertheless it is ranking on google page 1
after the update.

- Stay Away from Trustflow Links without any Traffic, thin content sites

The reason why social bookmark sites got hit that badly, seems in the mixture of very thin content, transfering some Trust Flow but no Traffic. That's seems to be the formula by with SERP are trying to hunt down PBNs.

New Strategy for 2017:

You can hit your sites with a ton of crap as long as it's nofollow, the funny part is
that it will rank anyway. I predict that Tumblr and Pinterest boards will rank extraordinaly
well in 2017 as the usually have a ton of nofollow crap pointing to them. This is confirmed
by seeing sudden changes on my Pinterest boards, some of them showing up as well on first
page google.

"Major Findings" - you haven't made any major finds, you are GUESSING.

"New strategy for 2017" - is what? to base everything you do around a guess you made?

You can't seriously claim you have worked out what Google are targeting from observations of 2 (TWO!) web 2.0 properties, and then recommend that people should do X, Y, and Z off the back of that.

Honestly, it's getting like the warrior forum on here lately.

Thanks for your intentions mate, but this really isn't a major finding.

The reason nofollow links are working is because those specific links aren't working.

Google is tracking users via Chrome and javascript, they're ranking largely based on user behavior. That's what's happening. Their user tracking has got so complete they simply take behavioral signals and rank based on that. Chrome and their javascript trackers are probably all over 90% of the WWW tracking everything.

I have to say this is such a thin test it's not going to give much of a help to you.

The results shown over a month over just 2 different Web2.0s aren't a true reflection of anything really.

Then thanks for the feedback and I will run a bigger test next time around.

you come up with this from observing 2 web 2.0. ..... world press is no social bookmarking page so even your conclusion sucks completely...

but good luck with your strategy 2017

Are you retarted or something ? The links were from social bookmark sites.

german seo said:

Are you retarted or something ? The links were from social bookmark sites.

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Don't be such a hater. What is your issues with retards? 60% of BHW members including myself are retards. That is a lot of people you are offending.

Don't be such a hater. What is your issues with retards? 60% of BHW members including myself are retards.

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Sorry, Charles Floate, you are right.

"
The reason why social bookmark sites got hit that badly, seems in the mixture of very thin content, transfering some Trust Flow but no Traffic. That's seems to be the formula by with SERP are trying to hunt down PBNs.
"

as not tested, it is a speculation.
but for me, it's the same old excact match anchor problems of your incoming links.

bartosimpsonio said:

Google is tracking users via Chrome and javascript, they're ranking largely based on user behavior. That's what's happening. Their user tracking has got so complete they simply take behavioral signals and rank based on that. Chrome and their javascript trackers are probably all over 90% of the WWW tracking everything.

Click to expand...

so we can finally rank without links?
wow. Hope moz will blog about this

darulez said:

so we can finally rank without links?
wow. Hope moz will blog about this

Click to expand...

Links are still the strongest factor. For competitive kw's you need links. For long tail kw's you can definitely rank with social signals alone.