Well, it is my first Blog post which is dedicated to the most hustling topic in SEO industry; everyone is worried about their websites ranking. By the way, not everyone, as some are having fun too.
You may have gone through a couple of posts on social media, blogs, Forums etc. Different people are talking about their experience after Unconfirmed Google Fred update. Google Fred update is not just too recent, a lot of dance has been happening after Google Penguin’s last update.
Here are few shots I took from a group on Facebook.
And some of them went too colorful.
Before I dig deep into it.
Here I introduce myself, which I am always bad at it.
My name is Waleed Najam. I started my career on 11th August, 2014. Right now, I am working as Digital Marketer for different SMEs with having top rated and preferred profiles on Upwork and Freelancer. And by the grace of Allah Almighty, I have a partner software services company MaxMind Solution here in Lahore, Pakistan. Beside that, I am certified by Google Adword and Bing Accredited Professional along with some other certifications too.
There are many reasons behind, to start my own blog, but one of them is my passion and interest for Blogging (tbh, there is not that much fun in money sites). And I’ll be focusing on Case Studies, SEO, SEM, Local E-commerce and SMM. Well, lets move forward.
I have seen fluctuation on SERP from the start of February. But after Google Fred update it’s a complete messed up as you don’t have a clear cut idea about whats happening. Sites with PBN and without both are fluctuating on SERP. I think it will take some more time to get things working.
But for those sites whose branding is good, and having few campaigns too are not still affected, and even they are ranking higher after the update.
Well, I concise it as the update majorly targeted low value content sites, irrelevant and spammy backlinks that conflicts with website’s content.
After having deep analysis through multiple resources, I have combined all the information and steps you should take after this Google Fred update.
Guest Posting, PBN, NBN and TDN
Gone are the days of spammy sites, now you need to avoid sites having following matrices and factors
- General niche PBNs are useless now.
- Avoid PBN’s with a lot of posts or having too many outbound links.
- Moz spam score greater than 3. Check backlinks of domain too and avoid sites having too many spammy backlinks.
- Way back, having adult, chinese, other language, drugs, illegal content as per policies of search Engine.
- Having Chinese, drugs, adult, gambling and other language anchor (yes, other language effects too)
- Having low MOZ PA/DA and Majestic’s TF/CF.
Do also consider these factors next time, whether you are finding PBN domains or buying guest posts.
- Try to link/find Niche relevant sites (Niche Blog Network). Trust me, you will rank higher in less NBN’s then a lot of general PBN’s.
- Lookup up Way Back of your PBN’s and don’t completely change the site as it was before.
- High matrices as DA/PA at least above 30.
PBN’s into Traffic Domain Network (TDN)
To get maximum link juice out of your PBN’s Turn your sites into TDN or buy domains having traffic, but they cost higher. All you need to do is to find keywords with low competition and low searches. Starting from even 10 avg. per month. You can easily rank on these keywords and in return you can get authority and traffic to your sites.
Soon, i’ll be sharing working link building methods and local E-commerce case studies. You can drop your email here for receiving monthly Emails.
Content – Huh, It is still the King
Search Engine Land recently analyzed 100 different sites and they believe this update mostly targets to low value content sites that value revenue above helping users. This Screenshot is one of those sites with low value content.
You have to prevent your sites from duplicate content, keep topic relevancy by adding LSI keywords and put valuable content for users. As the update targeted sites with poor content and content written for the sole purpose of ranking. So you must have to focus on user valuable content, which benefits the users in its own unique way. I recommend to do research yourself on topic to even understand what writers have done for you.
I have been listening and reading this around the community “Longer the content better you rank”. Are you sure about that?
Here the question is Why is the Sky blue? And you are going to write a 2000 words content for telling is it really blue or white. Writing long content do really helps but it is not always the solution. You always have to provide valuable content to your readers. Better CTR, better you rank, when you are in top 10.
“The idea behind topical relevance is that the more relevant your article is about your topic/keywords, the better your rankings will be. Now, this is 2009 news, but most people have no idea how to increase this relevance to the max. without keyword stuffing even in 2017. And increasing the topical relevance correlates with increasing the word count, a.k.a article length and when you think about it, it’s completely logical and makes perfect sense, because you can’t really explain everything possible about a certain topic in 500 words, unless the topic is very very narrow and your main keyword(s) are long tails.”
Source: Black Hat World
Relevancy – it’s all that matters
Whether, its content or link building you have to maintain relevancy. Traditional link building does not work anymore. But you can still take good out of it by maintaining relevancy. Now you have to work hard to make good backlinks. Here I am discussing new ways of link building bellow.
No More – Traditional Link building
Yes, traditional link building ways work no more. But SEO can make traditional link building great again with little efforts and changes.
Web 2.0
As previously simple Web 2.0 with spun and short content don’t work anymore, you have to create natural looking Web 2.0 or super Web 2.0. Add about us, privacy policy, disclaimer, contact us etc, pages to your Web 2.0. Do social sharing, add videos and images in your content. Add different articles to make them look natural.
PS: If you want to adopt black hat strategies by bombarding GSA, then don’t link directly your web 2.0’s to your site. Go with tier 3 and tier 4 in case you are a pro.
Real and Niche Relevant Sites
You have to find real and niche relevant sites. There are many authority sites that accept guest post as by asking “Write for Us” and they have mentioned their acceptance criteria.
There is a lot of ways available on Google for finding relevant sites but here I use this one as most.
Do deep competitor analysis, try to avoid brands as they get a lot of natural links. Find sites other than brands and explore there link profile. You can use ahref, moz, majestic, but here I use seoprofiler, you can create free account. And go to Link profiler > Backlinks. Then click on LIS to rearrange the sites and see percentage of their contribution in ranking.
Find sites and outreach them via emails. You’ll be wasting your time if you are sending spammy emails. Write proper emails and tell them how your guest post can be beneficial for their site. You’ll get around 60% replies in case you write relevant emails. Do ask me in comments I’ll email you some of the templates that work for me.
.Edu and Scholarship Campaigns
.edu domains always work far better than other TLD’s. Because of some specialized process for acquiring an .edu domain name and the authority these domains transfer are far more beneficial than any other TLD. For me .edu has always worked like a charm and has helped in staying long on SERP.
To design a Scholarship campaign you can look up this MOZ guide here. A successful Scholarship campaign can help you getting a lot of .edu links and you can rank for very long term. But do consider this guide too before getting into scholarship campaigns.
Comment Backlinks – How they Worked for me?
Yes, they still work for me because of these factors. Most important thing in comment backlink is to look for relevancy; you have to find niche relevant sites. Avoid sites accepting too many links in comments. And if you don’t want your comment to be deleted on authority sites than read article and comment accordingly (long relevant comments are mostly accepted).
Site wide Comments?
This is how forums rank, in recent tweet of Gary llles talks about comments on sites as sign of healthy site.
And here you have the answer.
If you are not getting comments on site then all you need to do, to get healthy comments on site is to do a lot of social sharing on different social media sites, and in their relevant groups and communities. If your content is valuable and debatable than you’ll get a lot of natural comments and you’ll see change your ranking pretty soon.
Inbound and Outbound Ratio
There are no such specific ratio suggestions by Google. All you have to do is to maintain ratio by linking to/from authority sites. Why I included inbound and outbound ratio is due to recent tweet by Gary IIIyes along with other tweets of Google Fred update, which is about stuffing your sites with too many links.
Fun Out Of Update
Ultimate Solution is here 😛
March’s Calender for SEO.
“If you want to play the game, than learn the rules first”
Although it’s the first post of your blog but you’ve done a great job and share useful information for those who recently been hurt by “Fred”. I think in near future blackhat will not be effective as google is updating it’s algo intelligently.
Thank you for the read, we have to play smart 🙂
Awesome Post with a lot of information.
Keep posting this type of useful Stuff.
Thanks
Thank you for the appreciation 🙂
Oh My god.. Its just awesome. In your first post you have done an amazing job. Keep rocking & keep doing great job.
Great, nice start. Keep it up!
There could have been no better article written about Google Fred.
Keep it up bro!
Waleed Najam, I learnt alot Today from your Post about Recent Google update.
Keep updating your blog and so tag me.
Jazak Allah
If anything from this post….Yes, relevancy, relevancy, relevancy. No spam. No spam. No spam. I’m rebuilding a new network of PBNs and will see how the new results turn out.
Wrote like a charm. Great post, got a lot of understandable stuff but here’s a thing I couldn’t get.
You wrote about ‘Forum Backlinks’, mostly signatures. What do you think about such links? Do these links give your site value? Boost rankings or considered spammy ones?
Forums like, quora, stack, yahoo answers, Blurt It etc works best :).
And i talk about side wide comments, which is comments on your post. That actually help Google understanding that your content is valuable and this is the reason why people are commenting on it.
Its really helpful for me to figure out my website performance.
Stay up man.
Thank you 🙂
Thanks Waleed Najam, my website is also effected because it was not updated regularly and secondly I was using too much ads on my website, this was the reason my website went down.
But your guide is awesome, now we have a clean idea about Fred Update….
Thank you, I hope you’ll workout on your site to get back 🙂
Thank you sir for sharing this article I read this article And I got to much new things that I really don’t know And please share this type of article so we understand and get something new thanks. BDw sharing is caring.(;
Thank you for the appreciation 🙂
Assalam-o-walaikum Waleed Najam. First of all congratulations for your first post on this blog. I read the full article, and I found many points that are just amazing. In last, I agree with your last statement on this post “If you want to play the game, then learn the rules first.”
Thank you brother, for the appreciation 🙂
Awesome post. Learned a lot but not really sure how this update is that different from past updates other than as it affects PBN’s which I no longer use.
Sounds like guest posting is crucial, but I also plan on looking at promotion on Pinterest and Instagram as I am seeing a lot of success stories with such promotions.
Pinterest and Insta would depend on your content. If it is that much engaging than definitely it’ll give a boost. Mostly those sites are effected which look for cheap and spammy ways to get on top. You can reach out niche bloggers for paid guest posts. It would help you in both traffic and SERP.
Nice bro. I think I may have been hit by Fred but its a bit too early to tell. About a week ago I moved to https which caused sime internal linking problems (they were all nofollowed ). My rankings have taken a hit for the time being. I hope it goes back to normal soon once Google recrawls the entire site, because it is far from thin content.
Yup, it will take some time to get back. Best of Luck (y)
nice
Awesome Informational Post for me very Helpful for me Thanks 🙂
Thank you for the read 🙂
Would say that general PBNS stopped working a while ago , however if you take a site and build topical pages out of them instead of posts they still work great. So if you have a PBN with multi topics- move the topics the category based pages and menus and the will power back up
Thank you for the read, will surely give this one a try, but i am having fun with NBN’s as every update take you higher. (y)
Amazing information. Thank you for sharing it. Could you please share the email template you mentioned in your post?
Sure, will drop you shortly.
Your first post is very helpful for me. Now I have a good idea of Fred update.
Thank you for the read 🙂
AOA Waleed,
Really good post, keep helping the community brother…
Well for me, as log as you are creating content for your visitors and are able to engage them somehow, you don’t have to care whatever updates google comes with.
Take example of viral blogs or sites, I mean they have the most shitty stuff on them – pics or videos only (almost no text or written content) – dump site structure – tons of unintentional spam backlinks, yet they are getting 60, 70 or even 80+ % traffic from search! Why b/c visitors love their content thus get tons of comments and share, make their content rank worthy in search’ eye…
Another tip, don’t go after keywords, try to be an influencer, ever seen videos on YouTube by these bloody genius YouTubers, I mean you land on their video by chance and they just bound you within 15-sec of their intro and you end up clicking their call-to-action links in the description. So, the thing is if your content is for visitors and it engages them as well then you can even sell “nike auto lace shoes” to the person who does have legs ?
Hope the points are taken.
Thank you for the read and that long comment 🙂
Viral blogging is different from blogging on Keywords. Difference is they generate traffic from mostly social media sites. Those sites who are copying content or just using images have already built authority years back in eyes of Google.
Yup, you absolutely right, engaging visitors is key to branding and success. I’ll definitely work on it.
Thankx again
Lots Of work Your Side and deep research truly amazing article
Thank you for the read 🙂
how to check backlink quality with free tool?
Since a week ago my visitor drop a lot, almost 80%.
I dont know if it affected by google fred update, or because now google.com not redirect to google country (like uk, it, etc) automatically.
Because I have local site that use my national language and didnt targeting global visitor.
first time I got problem like this.
you can use create Free account on MOZ, and check spam score of domain and its backlinks, else you have to check the website quality manually. Check it’s content and relevancy with your content. All tools just give u an idea, they are not perfect.
For local site, do follow local directories and citations, they work like charm for local sites.
Great article , I got hit by Fred on multiple domain’s.
Removed the ads and now hoping for the best .
Thank you Waleed Najam for the great article.
Please let me know if you’re looking for a article writer for your site. You have some really good articles and I think I would be a good asset. If you ever want to take some of the load off, I’d absolutely love to write some material for your blog in exchange for a link back to mine. Please blast me an e-mail if interested. Thank you!
Thank you for the offer, but I’ll continue to write myself, as i love it. 🙂
I read this article fully about the resemblance of hottest and earlier technologies, it’s awesome article.
Well, thankx buddy I’ll look into that.
Great post. The second half was the only part really relevant to my sites, but they brought some areas to lolight that others who have blogged about Fred missed. Fred has helped one of my sites, left one alone, but really put a just on a site I used to manage. I still have Google analytics for that site and peek in on it. The SEO company who took it over really went out on some risky link building and the scholarship link. Plus not one bit of new content has been added in 6 months nor any social media. They have dropped 50% in March.
I will keep an eye out for future posts from you! Thanks.
Thank you Jennifer, I’ll be writing more interesting articles.
I have also one question WALEED NAJAM bro. My website primary keyword drops from 2nd to 5th position after this fred updated. What Can i do now for to increase my ranking in 2nd spot again. Hope you help me to resolve my problem. Great Post.
Do these steps
Remove or disavow irrelevant and spammy backlinks
Do social signals as much as you can
Make authority and relevant backlink
and do wait for at least 2 weeks
Thank you so much for your great post.. honestly speaking it will be also help me too and heads of you for your deeply research
Thanks for helping me sir……. I have one more question that Can I hit 5 pbns in a single day to my money site. My site is 1 year old. I am waiting for ur reply.
You can hit, but let them index manually. I myself will prefer to use them day after by doing social signals.
Thanks Sir I have one more question that in past I do lot of irrelevant blog comments on blog commenting sites irrelevant to my niche…. Is there any method to remove my comment or remove my money site url on these blog commenting sites…… I think that is the big reason my site drops from 2nd to 5th spot….. Please help me to remove my money site url from these blog commenting sites. Hope you will help me related this issue. Thanks
There are two ways
1: DO manually reach those sites and ask the owner to delete your comment, or if you have access to those comments then delete by yourself.
2: Otherwise, use google disavow, but be careful with that. Do watch out some tutorials on youtube about how to disavow.
Thanks alot for helping me sir
Sure, your welcome. You can subscribe above to stay updated from next articles.
Thumbs Up
Yeah sure WALEED NAJAM bro
I’m usually to running a blog and i actually appreciate your content. The article has actually peaks my interest. I’m going to bookmark your web site and maintain checking for brand new information.
WALEED NAJAM, Thanks for sharing such a great info,
I have one more question sir…… Google keyword planner do no show me exact search volume of a keywords… It shows like that 50-1000 Search volume per month.. How I can switch to that keyword planner shows me exact search volume of a particular keyword. Please help me related this issue. Thanks
Yes, it would not show you exact searches until you run campaigns on AdWords. There is another way of finding exact searches is by installing Google chrome extension “Keywords Everywhere”. Do install this extension and it’ll show you searches on google result page. you can even see bulk searches too by upload list of keywords.
great blog sir i following you
Hello Waleed Bro, I just want to migrate my web hosting….. Can you please suggest me some good hosting provider…… Currently I am using name cheap hosting….. Very bad experience…… Please suggest me good web hosting for affiliate sites…. Hope you will reply me soon. Thanks
try Digital Ocean, they are going good so far 🙂
I do consider all the concepts you have presented on your post. They are really convincing and will definitely work. Still, the posts are very quick for beginners. May you please lengthen them a little from next time? Thank you for the post.
Thank you for the read, yes I’ll try my best to write nitty gritty for whatever I write about.
Excellent tips on this content. good sharing WALEED NAJAM.
Hello Sir I want to know one thing from you that Can i used spun articles in Web 2.0 or handwritten…………. Which would you prefer….. I have very confusion in it……. Please help me sir… Thanks
Never go with Spun, gone are the days of spun articles.
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You are a very intelligent person!
thanks, sir share this information about ultimate seo
“I really like your writing style, good info, thanks for posting. “Let every man mind his own business.”
AOA Waleed Bhai! I don’t know why is this update still affecting multiple sites. I have observed that there are a lot of websites/blogs which are being affected by this update and there is regular decrease in traffic of all those websites. It’s too strange, but you wrote a good article over this.
I Hope this will help you.
its amazing blog sir i appriciate your article thanks for sharing
I just want to say I am all new to weblog and certainly liked your web blog. Almost certainly I’m want to bookmark your blog post . You amazingly come with fantastic well written articles. Thanks a bunch for sharing with us your website page.
Nice And Very useful info,
This article important and really good the for me is.Keep it up and thanks to the writer.Amazing write-up,Great article. Thanks!
used to really good
your info is quite helpful to forever.
awesome article and impressive one so now i have get a lot of information about SEO
Its an Amazing article I read ever! I did not know much about Fred before reading this, but I am cleared now. This article was very helpful for me because recently I am thinking for buying some useless backlink from fiverr. I think you saved both my money and blog reputation. Thank you brother.
Nice Post
Terrific page, Keep up the very good job. Thank you so much.|