Google has released a new spam update, the October 2023 spam update. This update goes after cloaking, hacked, auto-generated, and scraped spam. But those sites written in Turkish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Hindi, Chinese, and other languages should see this more than maybe those in English languages.
This update will take a few weeks to roll out. It started yesterday, October 4th at 12:52 pm ET, as per the search status dashboard.
Below I will dive into what this update does, who it targets and what we’re seeing so far from this update (potentially). One note, this announcement was made by Duy Nguyen, a Google Search Quality Analyst.
October 2023 Google Spam Update Quick Facts
Here are the most important things that we know right now in short form:
Name: Google October 2023 Spam Update
Launched: October 4, 2023 at around 12:50 pm ET
Rollout: It will take a few weeks to fully roll out
Targets: It goes after cloaking, hacked, auto-generated, and scraped spam more so in Turkish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Hindi, Chinese, and other languages.
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.
Spam Update Targets:
Google said this October 2023 spam update “applies globally and improves our coverage in many languages, including Turkish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Hindi, Chinese, and other languages.”
This does impact English, Google’s Search Liaison confirmed:
This went after these types of spam:
Cloaking: Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content to users and search engines with the intent to manipulate search rankings and mislead users.
Hacked content: Hacked content is any content placed on a site without permission, due to vulnerabilities in a site’s security. Hacked content gives poor search results to our users and can potentially install malicious content on their machines.
Auto-generated content: Spammy automatically generated (or “auto-generated”) content is content that’s been generated programmatically without producing anything original or adding sufficient value; instead, it’s been generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users.
Scraped content spam: Some site owners base their sites around content taken (“scraped”) from other, often more reputable sites. Scraped content, even from high quality sources, without additional useful services or content provided by your site may not provide added value to users. It may also constitute copyright infringement. A site may also be demoted if a significant number of valid legal removal requests have been received.
Seeing Impact Yet?
It is hard to say if we are seeing the impact yet. We have been having a lot of chatter since the unconfirmed October 1st update – in fact, the chatter got a lot more heated yesterday and today. So this unconfirmed update may or may not be related to this.
I’ll share the chatter and Google tracking tools as well.
SEO Chatter:
Here is some of the recent chatter from comments from here and WebmasterWorld. Keep in mind, it might be too early to be related to this specific update:
Again, some of these comments may not be related to this update specifically and related to something else that started on October 1st but it is impossible for me to know for sure.
Google Tracking Tools:
Here is what the Google tracking tools are showing now; keep in mind that many tools have not been fully updated, and this is a three-week rollout. Plus, generally, spam updates should not show major fluctuations in these tools, especially since this seems to target languages outside of English in a bigger way.
Previous Spam Updates:
Here is a list of the previous spam updates:
December 14, 2022: Released the December 2022 link spam update. The rollout was complete as of January 12, 2023
October 19, 2022: Released the October 2022 spam update. The rollout was complete as of October 21, 2022.
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
What are you all seeing?
Forum discussion at X, Black Hat World and WebmasterWorld.
