Google October 2022 Spam Update Rolling Out

Google Search Spam Algorithm Update

It has been 11 months since the last time Google released a spam update and now Google announced the October 2022 spam update. Google said this update will take several days to complete and is a global update. Google said “Today we released the October 2022 spam update,” and added “This update is global and affects all languages. The update could take several days to complete.”

So far, in the past 24 hours, there appears to be very little movement in terms of both SEO chatter and the automated Google tracking tools. In short, so far, the rankings as a whole did not move so much. Of course, this may be a very targeted spam hit, so it might only impact a very small percentage of sites on the web. But for now, this update is so far not far-reaching. Again, it is super early and we will keep track of it and keep you posted. I should note, the previous spam update was pretty significant almost right away.

Don’t get me wrong, as you can see from some of the comments in this story, some were hit super hard. But it just does not seem super widespread yet – or maybe most SEOs have not picked up on it yet?

Here is the tweet announcing this update:

Google October 2022 Spam Update Quick Facts

Here are the most important things that we know right now in short form:

Name: Google October 2022 Spam Update
Launched: October 19, 2022 at around 11 am ET
Rollout: It will take several days to fully roll out
Targets: It improves Google’s spam detection techniques, Google said “sites that violate our policies may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all.”
Penalty: It penalizes spam techniques that are against Google’s spam policies.
Global: This is a global update impacting all regions and languages.
Impact: Google would not tell me what percentage of queries or searches were impacted by this update.
Recover: If you were hit by this, Google said you should review its spam policies to ensure they are complying with those.
Refreshes: Google will do periodic refreshes to the spam update. It can take many months to recover, Google said.

The previous update was the November 2021 spam update which was 11 months ago. Google linked to the spam updates help document that reads:

Here is a list of the previous spam updates:

November 3, 2021: Released the November 2021 spam update. The rollout was complete as of November 11, 2021 and seemed significant.
July 26, 2021: Released the July 2021 link spam update. The rollout was complete as of August 24, 2021.
June 28, 2021: Released the second part of the June 2021 spam update. The rollout was completed later that same day.
June 23, 2021: Released the first part of the June 2021 spam update. The rollout was completed later that same