Google Fred Update Part 2
This is part 2 of the Google Fred update and what we’re seeing. Watch part 1 here.
Welcome back Rankers! Jeez, a lot of people had a lot of interest in last week’s video about Fred. In case you missed it, Fred was the name of the latest Google update on March 9. It was named because Garry Illyes was being funny.
Anyway, a lot of questions came out of that and we’ve helped a lot of people via our YouTube channel. Incidentally, for those of you who are new here, this show has been going for about thirteen years, we do a weekly video that comes out every Tuesday night Australian Eastern Standard Time, and then there is a newsletter that follows that up on a Wednesday morning. So if you want to find out when the latest stuff is happening, make sure you subscribe to the YouTube channel. If you’re watching this on an embedded site, just click on the YouTube link within the video and just subscribe to the YouTube channel there where you’ll get all the updates. Or you can go to stewartmedia.com.au and you can sign up there for our newsletter. That’s housekeeping out of the way. And please, if this is helpful to you and you think it might help someone else, please share it.
Duplication
So some of the questions that came out were a bit basic, and I managed to answer most of those on the YouTube channel. But a few that required a little more explanation I just wanted to go through today. So what we’re trying to do here, and this is just good practise, regardless of the March 9 update, is to remove content that could be duplicated. For most of the sites I’ve looked at there has been a certain amount of duplication. Some of them just had odd problems like a 302 to a page that was noindexed and all sorts of silly things that probably wasn’t March 9 update that hit those sites. Those that did get clobbered it seems to be a range of quality issues. One of those is duplication.
I want to talk duplication. Specifically tag pages. If you’re in a WordPress environment, noindex your tag pages. You don’t have to delete your tag pages. Some people are under the impression that you have to delete them. You don’t. If you do that, it means you have to do redirects and all sorts of things. So you don’t actually have to delete your tag pages. What we’re saying is that if you’re on WordPress, just noindex those tag pages because for a lot of people they’ll only have one or two posts on a tag page and it represents the first paragraph of the post itself, so it’s just basically a duplication of the post and it’s not much use for your readers either.
Parameter Pages
Another question came out from Richard. A good question. He asked, “Could you please explain what ‘stopping Google crawling parameter pages’ means?” Okay. In some themes, and certainly in a lot of eCommerce sites, but specifically with this update we’re looking at WordPress sites, as they seem to be having the problems. We haven’t seen any eCommerce sites get hit by the update.
This is a good site to show where parameters are not really helping your ranking. This is actually another question from one of the bloggers. So if you are a blogger and you want to know more about SEO just from a blogger’s perspective and WordPress, head across to our BloggersSEO support group on Facebook. So this question was from Chuck, and he asked if we could look at this theme for him. He wanted to know if it was any good for SEO.
I told him what I didn’t like it for SEO, but it has a good example of the parameter pages. Quite often, they are just being used in a theme to ‘sort,’ basically. You can see this page, but it essentially has similar content to what the page would have without the query, ‘/?filter_by=popular.’ What’s doing it is this little function over here. So you can ask things like, “Show me by Review Score.” Then in the URL you can see we get, ‘/?filter_by=review_high.’ Those filters can cause those sorts of problems. Essentially, they will often lead to empty pages and we don’t need it. It’s those sorts of things that I want to get rid of. So in this situation, you can do one or possibly two things.
One of the things you can do that Google recommends to do, is using the ‘Parameter’ section in Google Search Console. So in GSC, under Crawl, there is URL Parameters. You can go in there and tell Google not to crawl these sorts of parameters. If you’re not used to using this area of GSC, it’s kind of for advanced users, so you may stuff things up if you don’t do it properly. But it’s in here where you can tell Google to ignore certain parameter pages or let Googlebot decide, and that’s what I mean when I spoke about getting rid of parameters.
Pagination
The reason I think it’s not just duplication of content but near duplication of say page titles and those sorts of things as well, because from our own experience, we had a phrase drop and one go up. So, for instance, if we look at ‘SEO agencies Melbourne’ phrase. This was on March 9.
If you’ve been watching the show for a while, you know we don’t necessarily chase SEO phrases for us. They’re good because they’re good for bragging rights, but we don’t get the right sorts of clients. So this phrase was just in our monitoring and on March 9, we dropped significantly to 70. I was confused as to why that happened. The only reason I could put it down to is that it was for a transcript page for a video from a couple of years ago. So this is a near duplication of a page title. There is another page just like it with the term ‘video transcript’ in it.
So if you are doing those sorts of things, where you’ve got near duplicate page titles, tag pages, pagination on your blog. The way to handle pagination is to use rel=”previous” and “next.” You can look those up and use those for pagination on your blog.
Hopefully that’s helpful. If we haven’t answered everything then just keep leaving the comments on this video and we’ll get to them one by one. I’m curious to find out. One of the guys that has come back, he’s only come back in Australia for his rankings. He hasn’t come back in the U.S. yet. So, if you are still experiencing problems, let us know because we’d love to take a look and get to the bottom of it. Thanks very much. I’ll see you next week. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
