What the Fred Update is - A Recovery Report

G

german seo

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I am running a couple of sites, basically in the alternate healing,
self help, and conspiracy theory niche.

On of my sites got hammered by Fred on 09 March, and left me without
any explanation what happended. I thought it was somehow ad related
and altered the site layout, which made it even worse as the bounce
rate spiked.

Starting from 1st position, medium competition money keyword, 3.600
ms, got knocked down to 3nd by Fred, which means I lost half my traffic.
Changing the page layout, brought my down on 4th position, losing
another 25%.

Then I figured out, by reading various different forums and sites, that
it is a general site quality update, hitting various factors as thin content,
duplicate content, off-topic pbn and sape.

This is how to figure out what exactly hit you:

- lost several positions in serp -> quality content issue
- lost several pages or weird google dance -> not strictly niche related pbn
- deindexed -> most likely sape

As I just lost several positions, it was most likely a content issue. I deleted the
tag pages of my wordpress page (duplicate content issue) and several thin content pages.
Removed the pages in search console, waited one day.

And I am back Nr. 1, baby.
 
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Great share, but I had a dance my end result was from 1st to 7th.. and i have been in 7th position for five days now. I have 1,000 words on the homepage, and its pretty much a single page site.. I don't think its the content for me, what do u think?
 
@TheGreene I think so, but it might take some time, till your new links have an effect.
 
this is great. almost people who have pbn link got penalized by fred.
 
I also lost several positions in the serps for quite a few keywords. Turns out I have all sorts of duplicate content caused by tags and category pages (I'm new to this!).

I would like to follow your method. Is this how you did it?

1) Delete tag pages and thin content pages (did you delete ALL tag pages?)

2) Use the "Remove URLs" feature in Search Console

How about setting tag pages to "no-index" instead of deleting them? I'm worried about littering my site with 404s.

Anything else? Did you resubmit sitemaps or anything else at all?

Your help is appreciated!
 
Last edited:
asawako said:
I also lost several positions in the serps for quite a few keywords. Turns out I have all sorts of duplicate content caused by tags and category pages (I'm new to this!).

I would like to follow your method. Is this how you did it?

1) Delete tag pages and thin content pages (did you delete ALL tag pages?)

2) Use the "Remove URLs" feature in Search Console

How about setting tag pages to "no-index" instead of deleting them? I'm worried about littering my site with 404s.

Anything else? Did you resubmit sitemaps or anything else at all?

Your help is appreciated!
Click to expand...

Don't delete them, use the smart Archive Page Remove plugin, wrote a reply in another thread. 404 might show up in the web search console anyway, but this way you can recover them in an instant if necessary.
 
IMO one day would not be enough for structural changes such as tag deletion and such to take effect.

You most likely were not penalized at all and it would have gone back to #1 had you not done anything.
 
IMO one day would not be enough for structural changes
Click to expand...
You are perfectly right. I answered this in the other thread. I made the change and saw a jump from 4 to 1 within 24 hours then it came back down to 4. After several days/recrawls it stayed on 1 where it was before the update.
 
@eunicemartinez_21 Sure.

I used the seobility crawler for doing it. You can crawl once in 24 hours with the free account, a free wordpress plugin
called smart Archive Page Remove and a broken link checker. Crawl your site first, make your changes, and crawl 24 hours later to check if your
site seo improved. Mine went from 58 to 80.

First you delete tags and categories in wordpress, then remove tags and categories pages using the free plugin, smart Archive Page Remove,
check with a broken link checker if there are any problems and redirect if necessary. Finally crawl your site with seobility again to see if there are any other issues.

Then go to search console and remove the pages, you have hidden with the plugin, you can recover them in
an instant if necessary.

You should see a jump in ratings 24-48 hours later, but it will not last as big G has to recrawl several times
to acknowledge the changes, so should see a recovery 4-5 days later.
 
another plugin to remove the crappy WP overoptimisation problems than been there since they created their crappy default themes and the "blog system"
makes me puke twice.
 
Excuse me, my english is not good. My website is using WordPress and there are a lot of tags. I have over 1500 posts and over 2500 tags. Most of these tags have only a few posts. It may be a big problem - duplicate content, Spam? I used meta "noindex, follow" for tags and don't show it in the post if the tag less than 5 posts (about 2500 tags). Does it affect crawling and reindex from Google bots if don't show tags in posts? I have resubmit sitemap.xml have include all urls of tags list(don't remove them). I checked my site indexing "site:..." and I saw very few indexed pages. Do you think I should Noindex or delete them? I need help from you all, Thank you very much.
 
Delete. No index. Redirect. Real issue behind tags isn't DC but on page
 
Onpage duplicate content issue was always so common, people never really tried to have pure sites, maybe they just added more weight to it.

In my case I was ranking nicely, Fred pumped me to first page from far away. I removed noindex tag from category pages and sent them to index. I dropped as soon as my category pages indexed (they were duplicates, same categories appeared under wp.com/category/bikes and wp.com/bikes).

Tbh I dont know how to remove one wariant. I made a 301 redirect from /bikes to /category/bikes but it will probably take ages before google acknowledges changes and this will not be seen as duplicate content anymore.... Hoping that will fix it.
 
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