Google releases November 2021 spam update

Google is rolling out a new search ranking algorithm update targeting the more spammy side of of the search results. The company is calling this update the “November 2021 spam update.” It should take about a week to fully roll out and be noticed in the search results.

The announcement. “As part of our regular work to improve results, we’ve released a spam update to our systems. This November 2021 spam update should be fully rolled out within a week. We encourage sites to follow our best practices for Search,” Google announced on Twitter. Google linked to the generic Google webmaster guidelines for more guidance.

Previous updates. Before this, the most recent confirmed Google update was back in July 2021 named the link spam update. Before that was the July 2021 core update, followed by the June 2021 core update, then part one and part two of the spam updates in June 2021. It’s been quite a year of updates.

Why we care. If you notice large ranking or traffic changes from your organic Google search results, you may have been hit by this spam update. Spam updates target specific guideline violations. Google did not say if this was links, content or other forms of spam, but rather just said it is spam-related in general.