Approximately 8 day ago i.e. on 9th March 2017 whole SEO community and webmasters were shocked because they all noticed nasty fluctuations in Google organic rankings and the reason is “Fred” an unconfirmed algorithm update of Google.
The name Fred came from Google’s Gary Illyes, who has jokingly suggested that all updates be named “Fred.” It’s sticking with this one.
In February there was a large content quality related update happened but Google didn’t confirmed. Google is very unlikely to confirm algorithm updates these days — but that won’t stop the professionals from reporting large shifts in the search results that convey an algorithm update has happened.
During the whole week webmasters and SEO professionals monitored hundreds of different sites and came to the results that Fred update targets low-value content sites that put revenue above helping their users.
In many cases, the content is wrapped around ads, where often the ads are a bit hard to differentiate from the content. In other cases, there are fewer ads or no ads, but rather there is revenue generation through affiliate models, lead generation or other avenues.
All the affected sites noticed 50 percent to 90 percent traffic drop from Google organic search results.
Final conclusion “Fred Google update” did indeed hit low-valued content sites aimed at revenue generation over the goal of helping their users and readers.
Also Read What is Google’s MUM update?
