In this morning’s Google hangout with John Mueller, John said “from our point of view there was no Fred update.” This is after they officially did confirm the Fred update a couple months ago. In fact, we covered this update in great detail and documented the patterns of the types of sites that got hit by this Fred update.

I guess when John said there was no Fred update, I think he is referring to how Google didn’t name it Fred. John added “this is a name that was given externally to a bunch of updates that we’ve been doing over time.” So it is a matter of semantics. “It’s not the case that there’s this one thing that is changing in search,” John said. “We make changes in search all the time,” he added.

He said this at the 2 minute mark into the video:

Here is the transcript:

Forum discussion at YouTube.