Losing Traffic Lately? Here’s What to Do

Have you noticed a drop in your website's traffic lately?

Is it mostly affecting organic search traffic?

If so, you might have been penalized by Google's recent new algorithm update, referred to in the SEO community as “Google Fred.”

Google's always pretty secretive about what exactly these algorithm changes are going after, and what exactly you're being penalized for.

But basically, based on what sites were affected, it looks like Fred went after the following three things:

Too many ads or too many affiliate links
Low value, generic content
Low quality backlinks

But wait.

How many ads are “too many?”

What makes a piece of content “generic” or “low value?”

What kinds of backlinks are considered “low quality?”

That's the kind of thing Google doesn't like to state directly. (Annoying, right?)

But if you've been hit by Fred, there are still a few things you can do to try to fix your site.

In a recent blog post, marketing expert Neil Patel explains the actions you need to take to recover from Fred.

I was affected. What should I do?

There are two specific actions I suggest you take right away.

The first is to assess your website in terms of ads and/or affiliate links.

If you were affected, there’s a good chance you’ve gone overboard on advertising.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s totally fine to incorporate ads on your site and sprinkle in a few affiliate links here and there.

Some top brands do it.

But it’s pretty obvious when it’s excessive.

Here’s an example of Mashable using ads the right way:

[image source: Moz]
Notice there’s just a single ad in the bottom left-hand corner.

It’s noticeable but doesn’t dominate the content in an obnoxious way, blending in with the rest of the page.

In other words, it doesn’t interfere with the user experience.

Here’s another example from Gadget Review:

[image source: Moz]
Again, the ad is plainly visible, but it doesn’t dominate the rest of the content.

As for affiliate links, you may want to delete those that are:

not necessary (e.g., not bringing any money),

detracting from your content or

likely to be deemed as spammy in any way.

The second thing you’ll want to do is check your link profile.

You can use several different tools for this.

One of my favorites is SEMrush.

The only issue is that the free, basic version is a little limited for analyzing backlinks.

However, the paid version offers all the data you could possibly need.

There’s also Moz’s Open Site Explorer.

It will provide you with some pretty solid information so you can see who’s linking to your site and tell if there are any problems.

Here’s what you do.

First type in your URL:

[image source: Moz]
Click on “Search:”

[image source: Moz]
Look for the “Inbound Links” section.

Click on “all pages” under “Link Source:”

[image source: Moz]
Then click on “only external:”

[image source: Moz]
This ensures you’re only seeing inbound links from external sites as opposed to internal links coming from within your site.

Here are some of the results I got:

[image source: Moz]
These all look good.

Social Media Examiner, Backlinko, The Content Marketing Institute and Buffer are all high-quality sites relevant to Quick Sprout.

But if I see anything questionable (e.g., low-quality and/or irrelevant sites), I would want to investigate further.

Let’s say you’ve spotted less-than-ideal links.

What do you do?

Disavowing problem links

If you find you’ve got links from questionable sites, your best bet is to disavow them.

This is somewhat of an involved process if you’ve never done it before, so I can’t adequately cover it here.

However, this post from NeilPatel.com will fill you in on the details and explain how to use Google’s disavow tool correctly.

Your goal is to get rid of any problem links by disavowing them.

In turn, this should improve your link profile and should help you recover.

What you need to know moving forward

So we’ve established that any backlash from the Fred update is most likely due to one or more of the following:

excessive ads/affiliate links

generic content that offers little to no value

low-quality backlinks pointing to your site

You’ll definitely want to avoid these transgressions moving forward.

Cutting back on ads and affiliate links is pretty easy. You just have to make some minor adjustments to your existing content.

And, of course, be conscious of how many affiliate links you include in your future content.

When it comes to generic content, that’s not always an easy fix.

The only remedy is to put in the time and energy to produce epic content.

This usually entails long-form content because it tends to be more in-depth than your run of the mill 500-word post.