Google is making big moves this October with the release of both a major core update and a spam update. This is already in the wake of Google’s helpful content update in September which had major impacts across all industries.
In case you didn’t know, Google has systems in place to detect, remove, and penalize webpages that violate its spam policies. To do this, Google uses both SpamBrain, an AI-based spam-prevention system, and occasionally human-manual review. This ensures that users aren’t overwhelmed with spam on their search journeys, and that they are paired with appropriate content. Updates are done in order to improve on these systems and address issues that users have reported.
Feel free to learn more about how previous updates have impacted website owners:
Update Alert:
October 2023: Google releases the October 2023 spam update. The rollout is still ongoing.
Google Cracking Down in October 2023 Spam Update
Google is tackling worldwide spam issues in its latest spam update. It was noted that more and more users reported that their search results were populating spam sites and links in various languages and countries.
More specifically, Google states:
This spam update aims to clean up several types of spam that our community members reported in Turkish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Hindi, Chinese, and other languages. We expect this to reduce the visible spam in search results, particularly when it comes to cloaking, hacked, auto-generated, and scraped spam.
Spam Issues Reported
From what we can tell, one of the main problems was that Google’s search results were populating numerous spam websites. While we decided to test this ourselves, we had to scroll a while before we found one. Granted, the update had already begun its rollout.
Based on chatter spaces, users reported that many U.S. local search results were showing websites and businesses with inappropriate domain suffixes (e.g. .pl, .ru, .de, .nl, .cz). As we don’t know the details of the reports that Google received from users, we can only guess that other countries were seeing similar issues.
Additionally, users throughout SEO forums report more and more AI-generated sites/pages are spamming information and outranking original pages. Time will tell if this update will help, or if this is something that we can expect to see fixed in the future.
In Conclusion
Google’s October 2023 spam update should address user issues with increased amounts of spam populating on the SERP. How these algorithm changes will effect webpages long-term is unknown. Thankfully, Google often runs updates so any unintended reverberations can be addressed in the next one.
Search volatility has been high, which means there is a chance your webpages will see fluctuations. With three large updates back-to-back from Google, it seems that website owners and SEO enthusiasts who have seen a hit are taking longer to recover. This is to be expected.
Recap: What We Know
Name: Google October 2023 Spam Update
Launched: October 4, 2023
Targets: Cloaking, hacked, auto-generated, and scraped spam.
Penalty: Penalizes spam techniques that go against Google’s spam policies.
Global: This is a global update impacting all regions and languages. Specifically noted: Turkish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Hindi, Chinese, and other languages including English.
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