Webmaster and SEO community, as well as the automated Google tracking tools, all showing strong indications of a Google algorithm ranking update in March of 2017.
The SEO industry has been watching an unconfirmed Google ranking update that seems to target more of the link quality aspects of the overall algorithm. The so called "Fred Update" a name that came from Google’s own Gary Illyes, who has suggested no doubt with his tongue in cheek that all updates are to be named “Fred. moving forward”
Out of nowhere suddenly we notice that the “black hat” SEO community have been seen to be making a lot of changes and are discussing this topic online. This could indicate that this update is a spam related algorithm update around links and the quality of such generally a good thing as this helps to screen out the bad SEOs in the market.
As you would expect, Google is very unlikely to confirm algorithm updates, but that does not stop SEO companies like ourselves reporting major shifts in the search results that could certainly represent a possible algorithm update.
Many of the automated tracking tools have also picked up significant volatility and fluctuations, which is also an indicator of a update of some kind or another being possible. This indicator along with all the industry discussions and the addition of the webmaster community complaining one the one hand about ranking declines and on the other ranking increases makes it likely that there was a Google update in our opinion.
If we hear anything official then you will be the first to know, if you want to keep yourself up to date with our posts on this subject maybe consider subscribing to the SEO Flatrate Newsletter. Currently however, we are waiting to hear if Google themselves will be making an announcement. All we have right now are the typical Google lines from John Mueller and Gary Illyes that Google makes updates all the time.
