SEARCHENGINES
Google October 2022 Spam Update Done Rolling Out In 42 Hours

In less than about 42 hours, Google has fully rolled out the last spam update – the Google October 2022 spam update. The update began on October 19, 2022, at about 11 am ET and was completed on October 21, 2022, at about 5 am ET.
That was quick, the previous spam update in November 2021 took 8 days to roll out but some previous spam updates were rolled out within 24 hours of launching.
The impact seems pretty big for those hit by this update, but the net was not widespread. Meaning, I don’t see a ton of complaints in the SEO community and the automated tracking tools are not showing huge volatility – not yet at least.
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: Completed on October 21, 2022 at around 5 am ET
- 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.
Previous Google Spam Updates:
SEO Chatter
Here is some of the early chatter on this October 2022 spam update from both WebmasterWorld and comments here. I am not seeing much more chatter than what I posted yesterday, so here is some of that chatter again plus a bit more that I didn’t post yesterday.
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
My traffic has been hit again with -150 -200 users. from the 600 users.
My website went down on 12 oct 2022, I don’t know the exact reason behind this but I was doing great.
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
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:
So are you seeing anything yet? Let us know.
Forum discussion at Twitter and WebmasterWorld.
Source: www.seroundtable.com
SEARCHENGINES
Google Search Console Shows If embedURL Page Uses indexifembedded

Google Search Console’s URL Inspection tool can now report if the embedURL page for a video uses the newish indexifembedded robots tag. The indexifembedded tells Google if Google is allowed to index the content of a page if it’s embedded in another page through iframes or similar HTML tags, in spite of a noindex rule.
This was spotted by Jon Henshaw and posted on LinkedIn. He explained that he requested that Google add to the URL Inspection Tool to show if “indexifembedded” is being used, “and through the stars and moons aligning and perhaps other miracles, they told me they added it today,” he said.
Here is his screenshot:
You can see in the “indexing allowed” section it says “No: ‘noindex’ detected in ‘robots’ meta tag, ‘indexifembdedded’ detected in ‘robots’ meta tag.”
Jon explained what this means:
If you use YouTube and make your video Unlisted, and then embed the video on your site, Google won’t index it. Why? Because they add a “noindex” directive to the page that serves the video on your page. Bummer!
However, if you use Vimeo, make your video Unlisted, and then embed it on your site, Google can still index it! Why? Because unlike YouTube, Vimeo adds “noindex” *and* a special directive created by Google called “indexifembedded.” That tells Google to index the video on any page that has an iframe embedded video.
Coupled with Vimeo automatically generating and inserting VideoObject Schema structured data for all embedded videos (including Unlisted videos), businesses now have the best chance they’ve ever had to get their pages to rank for videos instead of competing with their video hosting provider.
Jon knows this because well, he is the Senior Director, SEO at Vimeo, and Vimeo is a massive video site.
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Bard Won’t Link To Sources Too Often

As you know, we’ve been playing with Google Bard, it just started to roll out a couple of days ago. Early on, we were disappointed thus far with how limited it seemed and more so, how it rarely linked to sources and content creators. Now, Google got back to us on why this is the case.
Google added a few topics to the Bard FAQs, including “How and when does Bard cite sources in its responses?” Let me quote what it says:
Bard, like some other standalone LLM experiences, is intended to generate original content and not replicate existing content at length. We’ve designed our systems to limit the chances of this occurring, and we will continue to improve how these systems function. If Bard does directly quote at length from a webpage, it cites that page.
Bard was built to be a creative and helpful collaborator—it works well in creative tasks like helping you write an email or brainstorm ideas for a birthday party. We see it as a complementary experience to Google Search. That’s why we added the “Google It” button to Bard, so people can easily move from Bard to explore information from across the web.
Bard is an experiment, and we’ll use its launch as an opportunity to learn, iterate, and improve the experience as we get feedback from a range of stakeholders including people like you, publishers, creators, and more.
So since Bard “generates original content and not replicate existing content at length,” Google does not feel the need to cite sources? Bard will however cite sources and link to them if Bard “directly quotes at length from a webpage.”
Instead, Google wants you to go from Bard to Google with the “Google It”, “so people can easily move from Bard to explore information from across the web.” So click on links from Google Search, do not click on links from Bard, too often.
But things with Bard are early and may change, “Bard is an experiment, and we’ll use its launch as an opportunity to learn, iterate, and improve the experience as we get feedback from a range of stakeholders including people like you, publishers, creators, and more.”
Honestly, I am shocked, I did not think Google would launch Bard without citing and linking to sources as much as and as well as Bing Chat does. Even Gary Illyes from Google hinted publishers would be okay with it.
Let me show some examples (click on the images to enlarge).
Google Bard on “Who is Barry Schwartz?” – this is not me, this is the famous Barry Schwartz, by the way:
No citations with the default response from Google Bard.
But Bing, it gives 15 links to 15 different sources:
To be fair, if I work hard, and go to draft two, I get some citations from Google Bard:
I posted about this on Twitter and here is some of the response and reaction to Google’s FAQ statement on the citation bit:
What a joke. Absolutely brazen content theft.
— Don Caldwell 🦑 (@DonCald) March 22, 2023
Meanwhile, Google could care less: https://t.co/QQmZ1jA8WK
— Rutledge Daugette (@TheRealRutledge) March 22, 2023
A positive perspective: Bard is bound to say weird things and give inaccurate information. If that’s the case, you won’t necessarily want your brand up there co-signing certain conversations or answers.
— dog excited to meet pluto (@dogmeetpluto) March 22, 2023
That’s not great for site owners.
I’ve also seen a number of people share Bard responses that are questionable or outright wrong. Responses should be treated like discussing a topic with a questionably-informed internet rando, rather than a factual response if there’s no source.— Peggy K (@PeggyKTC) March 22, 2023
Uggh. No/Minimal citations is a big negative for me. (both as a creator, and potential user of Bard)
— ElizabethH (@ElizabethH15) March 22, 2023
IMHO it’s impossible to overstate what an enormous problem this is for publishers. If citations are not prevalent and prominent, publishers should be able to opt out of being used in training data without it having any affect on SEO. And every publisher should opt out.
— Michael Magnuson (@mdmagnuson) March 22, 2023
To be honest, the user in me prefers Bard’s UI/UX compared to Bing Chat.
The SEO in me hates the lack of sources, but the way Bing Chat has them incorporated just looks a bit naff.
— Chloe Ivy Rose (@chloeivyroseseo) March 22, 2023
That’s a massive miscalculation on their side, it’s the wrong result that they will need to address
— @[email protected] (@davidiwanow) March 22, 2023
I mean this section is *interesting*…
“For now, Google Bard likely won’t be sending a lot of traffic to the web or websites.”And likely a challenge for anyone trying to do research.
— Crystal Carter (she/her) (@CrystalontheWeb) March 22, 2023
I actually think #Bard could work very well for local if Google was willing to include URLs, use more its local knowledge graph and offer Maps links. pic.twitter.com/YZLB1DrY3u
— Greg Sterling 🇺🇦 (@gsterling) March 22, 2023
The same thought I had when started playing with it https://t.co/RllWsaQ9KQ
— Gianluca Fiorelli (@gfiorelli1) March 22, 2023
One shimmer of hope is that if and when Bard is integrated some how into Google Search, those integrations you will see more prominent links to content creators. Via the WSJ, “Sissie Hsiao, a vice president in charge of Google Assistant, said the company “is deeply committed in supporting a healthy and vibrant content ecosystem” and “will be welcoming conversations with stakeholders.” She said when AI tools are integrated into search the company will give priority to sending valuable traffic to content creators. “
Good to hear from Google’s Sissie Hsiao about Bard for Search + Citations -> “She said when AI tools are integrated into search, the company will give priority to sending valuable traffic to content creators.” https://t.co/K3U82vtAu6 pic.twitter.com/xWbRl7SLRs
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) March 22, 2023
So we will see. Until now, prepare to be disappointed with any little traffic you might see from Google Bard.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
SEARCHENGINES
Microsoft Bing’s CEO Says Google Bard Is Pretty Far Behind Bing Chat

Mikhail Parakhin, the current CEO of Bing at Microsoft and former CTO at Yandex said that Google Bard is “pretty far behind” compared to Bing Chat. “We learned to never underestimate Google,” he added.
Mikhail Parakhin wrote on Twitter when asked about his impressions of the Bard launch, and like many, he is a bit underwhelmed. He said, “They are pretty far behind, but it is impressive how much they were able to achieve given the low amount of compute they had and the fact that in core ML algorithms they are trailing the SOTA by, maybe, 6 months. Being “little folks”, we learned to never underestimate Google.”
Here are those tweets:
They are pretty far behind, but it is impressive how much they were able to achieve given the low amount of compute they had and the fact that in core ML algorithms they are trailing the SOTA by, maybe, 6 months. Being “little folks”, we learned to never underestimate Google.
— Mikhail Parakhin (@MParakhin) March 23, 2023
Not only did he say Google is “pretty far behind” when it comes to Bard, he said they also have a “low amount of compute” and their machine learning algorithm “are trailing” what Microsoft uses by about six months.
So that is what the head of Bing thinks about where Google is at right now with Bard, its answer to Bing Chat, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and other AI chat platforms.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
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