If you have been a longtime Google user, you know that the Google results page was not what it is today. It must have happened to you at that time that you were searching for a phrase in Google, and by clicking on one of the Google results, you entered a website that not only had weak and useless content, but was also full of advertisements. This would make you leave that site quickly and never come back!
But this is for the past. From somewhere later, in 2018, Google decided to fight against these sites and remove them from the results page. How? By introducing the Fred algorithm.
Fred’s algorithm, when released, made significant changes to Google’s results page. Many websites experienced a 90% drop. These websites generally had the following characteristics:
- Poor quality and worthless content.
- show a lot of ads,
- creating a negative user experience for the audience,
- Keyword stuffing or excessive use of keywords,
- Spelling, spelling and grammar mistakes in the content.
One of the most important things that Google considers for ranking sites on the search results page is the usefulness of the site’s content for the user and creating a positive user experience. For this reason, all Google updates in its algorithms are done to improve or monitor these two things. That’s why now that we are in 2022, we rarely come across sites full of ads and low-quality content.
In this article, the introduction of Fred algorithm and its effect on the site’s SEO has been discussed.
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What is Google’s Fred algorithm?
Introduced in 2018, the Fred algorithm is one of the most powerful algorithms created to combat poor content on websites and black hat SEO techniques. Fred’s update was able to have a great impact on the quality of the websites on the Google results page. Finally, this algorithm helped users to find a list of websites with relevant, useful and trusted content if they search for a specific phrase.
Why this algorithm is called Fred?
If you search Fred’s algorithm on Google, you will come across the image of the character Fred in the cartoon The Flintstones. It is interesting to know that there is no special connection between this algorithm and the character of the Flintstones cartoon. Fred is actually the name of one of the Google engineers who was responsible for this update.
The difference between Fred algorithm and Panda algorithm
Fred was not the first algorithm to combat poor website content. Before Fred, there were algorithms that focused on the quality of site content. One of the most famous of these algorithms is the Panda algorithm, which was introduced in 2011 to improve the quality of website content.
So what is the difference between Fred and Panda algorithm?
Maybe many people think of the blog section when it comes to content. But the content of the site is not only the blog section and articles of the site. All parts of the site come to life with content, and it is the content that makes the user trust your website or leave it.
The difference between the Panda algorithm and the Fred algorithm is that the Panda algorithm fights against low-quality blog content, while the Fred algorithm applies to all indexed elements and URLs in Google. When we say all elements indexed in Google, we mean images, videos, results related to store websites and summary of all types of content. As a result, it can be said that the Fred algorithm covers a wider part of the web content compared to the Panda algorithm.
The effect of Fred algorithm on site SEO
As mentioned, the Fred algorithm is here to combat poor quality content. This poor quality content is not only limited to blog content and includes everything that is indexed in Google. As a result, site SEO has become more complicated than before after the release of the Fred algorithm. As a result, SEO specialists should devote more time and energy to creating site content, unlike in the past when content creation was their least laborious task. This means that low-quality content on the site in any way will cause the site’s rank to drop, and compared to websites that have quality content, they will experience an improvement in rank.
How to understand that the Fred algorithm has affected the website?
To check if the Fred algorithm has affected your website or not, the best way is to check the site traffic.
If the traffic of the site has a significant drop or growth at some point, it may be due to the influence of the Fred algorithm.
Another factor that you can use to determine the impact of the Fred algorithm on the site is the sudden change in the rank of the site’s keywords.
Note that none of these cases are solely due to the influence of Fred’s algorithm. As you know, many factors affect the SEO of the site. As a result, it is not possible to definitely attribute the growth or decline of the website to a specific factor or algorithm.
How to optimize the website for the Fred algorithm?
As an SEO specialist who is responsible for optimizing the site for search engine algorithms, you must always be ready in front of Google’s algorithms and updates. As a result, it is better to pay attention to the following:
- The content published on the website must have a clear, clear and specific purpose.
- In the content of the site, unnecessary and unrelated topics should not be discussed.
- Quality content is not necessarily long and boring content.
- Using relevant keywords in the content, tags including h1 to h6 tags, alt tag, meta description, etc. should be optimized.
- Advertising is one of the website’s revenue sources. As a result, it cannot be said to remove the ads! But these advertisements must be placed in the appropriate and previously predicted place; so as not to divert the site from its main purpose.