Google unleashes October 2023 spam update

Google said this update improves its "coverage in many languages and spam types" and will roll out over the next few weeks.

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Google has unleashed a new search update today, the October 2023 spam update. This spam update improves Google’s “coverage in many languages and spam types,” Google wrote.

Types of spam. Google said the October 2023 spam update “aims to clean up several types of spam that our community members reported in Turkish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Hindi, Chinese, and other languages.”

Google said that update should “reduce the visible spam in search results, particularly when it comes to cloaking, hacked, auto-generated, and scraped spam.”

Few week roll out. The update will take a few weeks to roll out.

Previous updates. Before this, the most recent confirmed Google spam update was the October 2022 spam update and the  December 2022 link spam update. Before that was the  November 2021 spam update. Google also released a two-part Spam Update – on June 23 and June 28 in 2021, as well as the July 2021 link spam update.

Why we care. If you notice changes to your rankings over the next few weeks and your site is not primarily English, although, it may target English results, it may be related to this. This update specifically targets cloaking, hacked, auto-generated, and scraped spam.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on her personal site.