Fred Google Update & Ecommerce Sites

[BeckyKey]

Hi

I've seen a couple areas of our site drop in average rankings for some areas since the 'Fred' update. We don't have ads on our site, but I'm wondering if it's 'thin' content - http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/

We are an ecommerce site and we have some content on our category pages - which is a bit more generic about the section/products within that section - but how can it not be if it's a category page with products on?

I am working on adding topic based content/user guides etc to be more helpful for customers, but I'd love some advice on generating traffic to category pages.

Is it better to rank these other topic/user guide pages instead of the category page & then hope the customer clicks through to products?

Advice welcome

[BeckyKey]

Hi

Thanks for the reply. I haven't seen huge traffic drops, it's more than a lot of keywords have dropped out of rankings, but I think it was for pages which don't rank highly anyway.

It just seems to coincide with a domain authority drop as well.

I'm keeping up to date with it but can't find anything concrete on whats affected us

Thanks

[Anthony_Howard]

Hi Becky,  I've been watching a couple clients sites have very specific non-branded keyword ranking drops... A few colleagues are having much larger traffic ranking drop issues as well... I don't think we will know anything right away. Have to let the dust settle, as I am sure everyone is testing like crazy as are we to see the effects of FRED, and what changes those effects if anything.

My colleagues are freaking out, though I keep reassuring them to calm down and not do anything drastic that could possibly negatively affect their site in the long run. From what I am seeing across the web first place to check is to go over Google's Webmaster Guidelines and verify you are compliant in every way....until we know more. Good Luck!

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-confirm-fred-algorithm-update-23603.html

[BeckyKey]

Hi

Thank you for your response - we're currently running an AB test which is why you get to this URL, the main homepage is http://www.key.co.uk/en/key without the B & before I started working here, the site structure was developed by our parent company in France

Would you say this is still an issue?

I know we need to add quality content, videos, quality backlinks etc - I'm just trying to prioritise and at the moment it is just me doing SEO with 20,000 products, so you never feel like you're getting anywhere.

Thank you for your help! x

[brettmandoes]

Thin content could be the culprit, but there are other things it could be as well. Without access to historical data, past SEO activities, etc. it's nigh impossible to tell you why you're experiencing a drop in rankings, especially since you're citing the "fred" update, which we still don't know anything about.

When I visited that URL the site structure seemed odd to me, as I was redirected to http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/b, which is pretty deep in your site architecture. This means links to your website www.key.co.uk are passing page rank down through three subpages to get to /b. Page rank should pass 100% through 301 redirects now, but I'm not 100% certain how Googlebot views your structure since it seems like you've got a redirect chain going there. If you can simplify your site architecture and check Search Console to make sure that it's technically healthy, then you're off to a good start.