Image: Possessed Photography on Unsplash
Google announced on 4 October that it had released the October 2023 spam update. The update is global and will improve coverage in multiple languages and spam types. It will take "a few weeks" to complete.
The update targets several types of spam reported in Turkish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Hindi, Chinese, and other languages, and Google said they expected visible spam to be reduced in the search results “particularly when it comes to cloaking, hacked, auto-generated, and scraped spam”.
This is Google’s first spam update in 2023. There were two updates in 2022: the link spam update in December and the spam update in October.
The spam update comes hot on the heels of the helpful content update which only finished rolling out on 28 September, and it runs concurrently with the October 2023 core update which was announced on 5 October.
Expect some volatility in the results while the update is rolling out and for a few days after completion as the results settle. It's then worth checking your rankings and reviewing Google's spam policies if you see any drops.
**Update 21 Oct: The rollout completed on 20 October 2023.
