Google October 2022 Spam Update Rolling Out

It has been 11 months since the last time Google released a spam update and now Google announced the October 2022 spam update. Google said this update will take several days to complete and is a global update. Google said “Today we released the October 2022 spam update,” and added “This update is global and affects all languages. The update could take several days to complete.”

So far, in the past 24 hours, there appears to be very little movement in terms of both SEO chatter and the automated Google tracking tools. In short, so far, the rankings as a whole did not move so much. Of course, this may be a very targeted spam hit, so it might only impact a very small percentage of sites on the web. But for now, this update is so far not far-reaching. Again, it is super early and we will keep track of it and keep you posted. I should note, the previous spam update was pretty significant almost right away.

Don’t get me wrong, as you can see from some of the comments in this story, some were hit super hard. But it just does not seem super widespread yet – or maybe most SEOs have not picked up on it yet?

Here is the tweet announcing this update:

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

Google October 2022 Spam Update Quick Facts

Here are the most important things that we know right now in short form:

• Name: Google October 2022 Spam Update
• Launched: October 19, 2022 at around 11 am ET
• Rollout: It will take several days to fully roll out
• Targets: It improves Google’s spam detection techniques, Google said “sites that violate our policies may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all.”
• Penalty: It penalizes spam techniques that are against Google’s spam policies.
• Global: This is a global update impacting all regions and languages.
• Impact: Google would not tell me what percentage of queries or searches were impacted by this update.
• Recover: If you were hit by this, Google said you should review its spam policies to ensure they are complying with those.
• Refreshes: Google will do periodic refreshes to the spam update. It can take many months to recover, Google said.

The previous update was the November 2021 spam update which was 11 months ago. Google linked to the spam updates help document that reads:

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.

Here is a list of the previous spam updates:

SEO Chatter

Here is some of the early chatter on this October 2022 spam update from both WebmasterWorld and comments here:

Lost more than 50% since yesterday. Hope this is temporary.

Day after day I see the number of indexed pages decreasing (I mean on Search Console).

Furthermore, the new pages are in no way taken into consideration, despite the various additions on SC, the links on the site, sitemap, social links etc.

down 30-40% in HCU, recovered 15-20% in the core, back down to HCU levels in PRU (not even a single affiliate link or product review article in the site), and now prob. going down even below as the rankings are worst it’s ever been

All of a sudden, Lost all the feature snippet of site in this unannounced update. Does anyone know the cause of it? Is this “site-wide snippet penalty” or “Bug in Google system”?

right now seeing sharp decline in ranking, is that update announced or not?

50k daily to 2k. well done Google

It’s a spam update. If you’ve been making spam, maybe don’t make spam.

— 🦇 johnmu: cats are not people 🦇 (@JohnMu) October 19, 2022

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It’s more of a general spam update, but even there, everything kinda drifts into the same direction (reducing spam in search also helps highlight other good content).

— 🦇 johnmu: cats are not people 🦇 (@JohnMu) October 19, 2022

We have the spam policies that list a lot of this: https://t.co/tzuNXIVzop

— 🦇 johnmu: cats are not people 🦇 (@JohnMu) October 19, 2022

The last spam update we announced was November last year, so it’s not a ton of big, announced updates. We do work on our systems regularly outside of those too.

But yes, there are lots of curious people on the internet 🙂

— 🦇 johnmu: cats are not people 🦇 (@JohnMu) October 20, 2022

Google Tracking Tools

Less than a day later, here are what the tracking tools are showing:

Semrush:

Mozcast:

SERP Metrics:

Advanced Web Rankings:

RankRanger:

Accuranker:

Cognitive SEO:

Algoroo:

SERPwoo:

SERPStat:

So are you seeing anything yet? Let us know.

Forum discussion at Twitter and WebmasterWorld.