It’s been a busy few months in the search space as SEO’s have bounced from one update to the next barely getting a moment’s rest between major Google releases. In the last couple of months alone we’ve had the product review update followed by the helpful content update; these major back to back updates have sent many sites with low quality content into a tailspin. Today, Google announced a third update in as many months – this time centered around spam. Today’s tweet from the company states:
Today we released the October 2022 spam update. Find out more about spam updates at https://developers.google.com/search/updates/spam-updates… . We’ll update our ranking release history page when the rollout is complete:
Google haven’t specified precisely what will be affected or changed with the October 2022 spam update, they rarely get into the fine details after all; but it is worth noting what they consider spam and what John Mueller (of Google Search) was signposting users to take heed of today. Google provide this handy list of examples in case you’re worried that your site might be at risk:
- Doorway pages
- Hacked websites
- Hidden text and links
- Keyword stuffing
- Link spam
- Machine generated content
- Malware
- Misleading functionality
- Scraped content
- Sneaky redirects
- Thin affiliate pages
- User generated content
It goes without saying that you’ll want to avoid any of these on your website. As for that last one, that might give you pause for concern. I don’t for one second think that Google intend to penalize genuine user generated content that relates to the content in question. For example, a recipe site with comments from readers expressing their success or failure with the recipe. What they might take a harsh view on though is spammy UG content, from malware/spam/phishing sites – looking to populate areas of your site with fake info and spammy links. But you don’t allow those to get published, right?
If you’re still confused – you should be assured most of these rarely happen by mistake. Most of these occur by intentional, sustained and scaled behavior. If you’re worried about the update you can always drop us an email to review your site, we’re happy to look over any items of concern.
As with all Google updates, today is just day one of the rollout, expect it to take several to complete. Google usually confirm when the process is complete, and it’s only then we start to look at the multi-day impact to search traffic.
Update October 28th: with October 2022 spam update now complete, SEO chatter about the impact is flooding in. The site’s hit the hardest do indeed seem to be those pushing the boundaries of acceptable practice. In particular sites that exploit AI generated content have seen significant impact. The consensus is that if you’ve been affected by this update – you’ve been updated VERY hard.