In this morning's Google hangout with John Mueller, John said "from our point of view there was no Fred update." This is after they officially did confirm the Fred update a couple months ago. In fact, we covered this update in great detail and documented the patterns of the types of sites that got hit by this Fred update.
I guess when John said there was no Fred update, I think he is referring to how Google didn't name it Fred. John added "this is a name that was given externally to a bunch of updates that we've been doing over time." So it is a matter of semantics. "It's not the case that there's this one thing that is changing in search," John said. "We make changes in search all the time," he added.
He said this at the 2 minute mark into the video:
Here is the transcript:
How did the Fred update impact the e-commerce websites? Why did so many e-commerce sites see a drop in ranking? What can we do to kind of recover that loss?So from from our point of view there was no Fred update.
This is a name that was given externally to a bunch of updates that we've been doing over time. So it's not the case that there's this one thing that is changing in search. We make changes in search all the time and we're always working on trying to find ways to bring more relevant, more high-quality content to users, and that can be affecting a variety of websites. And variety of areas where we show content and search.
So it's not specific to anything ecommerce related that we would say if this is an e-commerce website then we will show it lower and search just because it's an e-commerce website. I don't think that kind of connection would make sense. We try to do this really on the basis of what we think is relevant and useful for users. So if your website is seeing strong fluctuations with regards to any general search changes. Then I would recommend maybe taking a step back and thinking about what you can do to significantly increase the quality of the website overall. And that's not like a simple thing for most parts. That's really something that sometimes takes takes a bit of work to really kind of take a step back from the thing that you've been focusing on for so long. To really get objective feedback from other people, as well and to think about what you could be doing to not just tweak things a little bit but really take it to the next level.
Forum discussion at YouTube.
