Recovering From Fred Update

Hey guys,

We ran a test on 6 different client sites that were affected with Fred Update. 3 of them recovered last week.

Though we are not sure, it seems like the Fred Update was imposed on sites that have too many affiliate links or advertisements.

I will keep you guys posted. But for now, I think this is the case. If you are trying to recover from Fred, try reducing your affiliate links for two weeks and see what happens.

Thanks

Naked aff links = Fred treatment.

This update is screening the sites by looking at all the external links that are linking to affiliate/media buy/too much adsense sites.

I suggest everyone who got affected to install wp external links plugin which will automatically add "nofollow" attribute to all the external links and if you want to be super cautious., shorten the aff links and the Fred will never hit your site again.

Looks like the update affected only google.com's index and is not rolled out worldwide cos I'm watching a bunch of aff sites still ranking long and strong on google.co.*.

in my case, a site hit by fred was recovered automatically on 2nd may. The only thing i can confirm is some of the bulk links i created were removed because the sites using that script removes it.

So in my case Fred was about backlinks

Can you elaborate a little. How many aff links you usually use for each review page?