On 19th October 2022, Google took to Twitter to confirm rollout of yet another update, titled October 2022 Spam Update. As with all Google Updates, it was believed to finish rolling out in a minimum of one week. However, it ended on 21st October, just 2 days after it was released. While the details about what the update specifically targets are almost never shared, Spam Update, like all other updates, aims to improve the quality of search results by taking spammy results out of the equation. It was a global update affecting websites in all languages. And it brings the total number of Google Updates to be released in the year 2022 to 8. The last Spam Update released by Google was back in November 2021.
Today we released the October 2022 spam update. Find out more about spam updates at https://t.co/XthD5GF06M . We'll update our ranking release history page when the rollout is complete: https://t.co/sQ5COfvo3J
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) October 19, 2022
Why does Google release a Spam Update?
As per Google Developers Documentation:
“While Google’s automated systems to detect search spam are constantly operating, we occasionally make notable improvements to how they work. When we do, we refer to this as a spam update and share when they happen on our list of Google Search ranking updates. For example, SpamBrain is our AI-based spam-prevention system. From time-to-time, we improve that system to make it better at spotting spam and to help ensure it catches new types of spam. Sites that see a change after a spam update should review our spam policies to ensure they are complying with those. Sites that violate our policies may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all. Making changes may help a site improve if our automated systems learn over a period of months that the site complies with our spam policies.”
How big was Google October 2022 Spam Update?
Given the fact that this update lasted less than 48 hours, it was not as devastating in its impact as it usually is. Frankly, the timeframe wasn’t that wide for the tracking tools to analyse how it impacted various websites across various niches. Imposter websites that tried to game the system by climbing the top of the search results by appearing more relevant than they actually were hit nevertheless, as they should rightly have. However, industry chatter does suggest that some strata of the web space experienced minor to major drop in rakings and traffic. Some even stated losing out on about 90% of the search traffic even though they were following Whitehat SEO strategies. Now that is genuinely a terrifying stat. Lastly, there were some who complained that the new links weren’t indexing. The chatter seems to suggest that even though the rollout was short-lived; its aftershock was felt majorly in the days that followed.
What to do if you’re hit by October 2022 Spam Update?
First things first, you should have long, hard look at Google Search Essentials, formerly known as Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, to check if you’ve unintentionally violated something. Try and turn those red flags into the green ones, wait it out for a few days, and see if the situation has improved since then. If you feel hard done by this spam update and feel that immediate corrective action needs to be taken then you can either leave us a comment below or contact us directly and we will schedule a consultation call in no time. In the meanwhile, you can check out 10 STEPS TO IMPROVE YOUR SERP RANKINGS IN 2020 WITHOUT BEING PENALIZED BY GOOGLE: A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE.
