This week Google released a new update to its search engine and this has caused concern among some publishers – it seems that Google is penalising websites that display too many adverts. Google has not made any official statement regarding the update – it is the SEO community that has decided to call this update \u201cFred\u201d.<\/p>\n
The reason why \u201cFred\u201d has been chosen is because Gary Illyes, Google\u2019s current webmaster trends spokesperson, said that from now on he was going to call all Google updates \u201cFred\u201d, simply because he was fed up with SEOs constantly asking him what the latest update was called. The SEO community is rather obsessed with naming each update that has a noticeable affect, even though Google keeps reminding webmasters that it actually makes a couple of updates to the search engine every day. The most recent one was really not all that important, unless of course, it affected you!<\/p>\n
So far the best analysis of this update that we have seen has been provided by Barry Schwartz on the Search Engine Roundtable blog<\/a>. He examined 70 sites that had been affected, and found that a majority of these sites were content driven sites with a lot of adverts. Schwarz\u2019s opinion is that many, if not all, of the sites affected were built specifically to make money from advertising. This has caused many to suggest that the update is targeting ad publishers (read on).<\/p>\n The so-called \u201cFred\u201d update appears to have a few similarities with Panda updates, in that it is looking at how content is managed across a domain. It is possible that Google is now capable of identifying when content is created purely for generating advertising revenue. That might not mean that the ads are the problem, but low-value churned out content that only exists to run ads on might be.<\/p>\n There are a few more clues to be had from Gary Illyes twitter stream (which also contains a lot of fish pictures). Three tweets in particular stood out to us:<\/p>\n DYK that you can rank well with short content, too? Long form content is not always the answer. pic.twitter.com\/tpb1D06iiW<\/a><\/p>\n — Gary \u9be8\u7406\uff0f\uacbd\ub9ac Illyes (so official, trust me) (@methode) March 9, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n