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Google October 2022 Spam Update Rolling Out

Published

2 years ago

October 20, 2022

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:

So are you seeing anything yet? Let us know.

Forum discussion at Twitter and WebmasterWorld.

Source: www.seroundtable.com

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Daily Search Forum Recap: October 20, 2022

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Daily Search Forum Recap: April 25, 2024

Published

9 hours ago

April 25, 2024

Entireweb News Bot

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

The Google March 2024 core update is still rolling out and the SEO chatter is super heated despite the tools calming. Google Ads API version 16.1 is now out. Google’s John Mueller says splitting and merging sites takes longer than normal site moves for Google to process. Google updated its favicon documentation. And a scathing report on how Google executive Prabhakar Raghavan killed Google Search.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

Google March Core Update Stilling Rolling Out & Heated SEO Chatter Continue

Over the past few days, while I was offline, the SEO chatter around the Google search ranking volatility continued to be super heated. The Google tracking tools seemed to calm down a bit, but the chatter is still very heated. This is all while the Google March 2024 core update is still rolling out 51 days later.

Report: How Prabhakar Raghavan Killed Google Search

Ed Zitron wrote a piece named The Man Who Killed Google Search. It goes through in detail how Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s former head of ads – led a coup so that he could run Google Search, and how an email chain from 2019 began a cascade of events that would lead to him running it into the ground, he said.

Google Favicon Documentation Adds Rel Attribute Value Definitions

Google has updated its favicon documentation for Google Search to add definitions for each supported rel attribute value in the Google Search favicon documentation.

Google Ads API Version 16.1 Now Available

Google released version 16.1 of the Google Ads API yesterday. The update includes query assets for Demand Gen, more location service details, more support warnings, Target ROAS bid simulation and more.

Google: Splitting & Merging Sites Takes Longer Than Normal Site Migrations

Want to scare an SEO? Just tell them they need to manage a site migration. Want to make an SEO faint? Tell them they need to manage to split a site into two or more sites while merging content on those sites. John Mueller from Google said it takes Google longer to process site splits and merges than normal site migrations.

Google Chefs In Dublin

Here is a photo I found on Instagram of a bunch of chefs at the Google office in Dublin. I am not sure if this was for some event or if Googlers were doing some sort of cooking class but it was a photo that caught my eye.

Other Great Search Threads:

Interested in AI assistants within YouTube? -> The new experimental “Ask AI” feature in YouTube is pretty cool. Just tap the button and ask any question about the video you’re watching. Note, AI can’t control the video player as of n, Glenn Gabe on X

What skeleton do you have in your closet?, WebmasterWorld

Googlebot will crawl from one location (often the US), and if you redirect it based on its location, Googlebot would only see (and index) that country version. It’s better to use something like a banner., John Mueller on X

I don’t know your sites, but even if the content’s the same, they’re essentially different sites (especially with ccTLDs), so it would be normal for a migration to affect them differently (and this seems to be quite a way back in the meantime)., John Mueller on X

Search engines recrawl URLs at different rates, sometimes it’s multiple times a day, sometimes it’s once every few months. The verified removal tool is fastest, the public removal tool takes a few days because it needs to verify the URL properly., John Mueller on X

You are now a Google Search Engineer. How do you fix organic search?, Gareth Boyd on X

Search Engine Land Stories:

Feedback:

Have feedback on this daily recap; let me know on Twitter @rustybrick or @seroundtable, on Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky and you can follow us on Facebook and on Google News and make sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or just contact us the old fashion way.

SEARCHENGINES

Google Won’t Change The 301 Signals For Ranking & SEO

Published

1 day ago

April 24, 2024

Entireweb News Bot

Gary Illyes from Google said on stage at the SERP conference last week that there is no way that Google would change how the 301 redirect signal works for SEO or search rankings. Gary added that it’s a very reliable signal.

Nikola Minkov quoted Gary Illyes as saying, “It is a very reliable signal, and there is no way we could change that signal,” when asked if a 301 redirect not working is a myth. Honestly, I am not sure the context of this question, as it is not clear from the post on X, but here it is:

More from @methode:
– 301 redirect not working is a myth. “It is a very reliable signal, and there is no way we could change that signal”.#SERPConf2024 #SERPConf2024International
— Nikola Minkov (@n_minkov) April 19, 2024

We’ve covered 301 redirects here countless times – but I never saw a myth that Google does not use 301 redirects as a signal for canonicalization or for passing signals from an old URL to the redirected URL.

Forum discussion at X.

Note: This was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today, I am currently offline for Passover.

SEARCHENGINES

Google Again Says Ignore Link Spam Especially To 404 Pages

Published

3 days ago

April 23, 2024

Entireweb News Bot

I am not sure how many times Google has said that you do not need to disavow spammy links, that you can ignore link spam attacks and that links pointing to pages that 404/410 are links that do not count – but John Mueller from Google said it again.

In a thread on X, John Mueller from Google wrote, “if the links are going to URLs that 404 on your site, they’re already dropped.” “They do nothing,” he added, “If there’s no indexable destination URL, there’s no link.”

John then added, “I’d generally ignore link-spam, and definitely ignore link-spam to 404s.”

Asking if it would hurt to disavow, after responding with the messages above, John wrote:

It will do absolutely nothing. I would take the time to rework a holistic & forward-looking strategy for the site overall instead of working on incremental tweaks (other tweaks might do something, but you probably need real change, not tweaks).

Earlier this year we had tons of SEOs notice spammy links to 404 error pages, John said ignore them. In 2021, Google said links to 404 pages do not count, Google also said that in 2012 and many other times.

Plus, outside of links to 404 pages, Google has said to ignore spammy links, time and time again – even the toxic links – ignore them. The messaging around this changed in 2016 when Penguin 4.0 was released and Google began devaluing links over demoting them.

Here are those new posts in context:

I’d say add both. Lol
— Jeremy Rivera (@JeremyRiveraSEO) April 11, 2024

Sure. But also, save yourself the work completely :-).
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024

Re-reading your initial post – if the links are going to URLs that 404 on your site, they’re already dropped. They do nothing. If there’s no indexable destination URL, there’s no link. I’d generally ignore link-spam, and definitely ignore link-spam to 404s.
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024

… but still… is this a dumb idea?
— Rebekah Edwards (@rebekah_creates) April 11, 2024
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It will do absolutely nothing. I would take the time to rework a holistic & forward-looking strategy for the site overall instead of working on incremental tweaks (other tweaks might do something, but you probably need real change, not tweaks).
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024

And in general, Google says it ignores spammy links, so you should too (not new) but this post from John Mueller is:

I would just ignore them, Google ignores them too. Sometimes they’re just more visible in tools, but that doesn’t mean they’re a problem.
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 18, 2024

And then also on Mastodon wrote about a similar situation, “Google has 2 decades of practice of ignoring spammy links. There’s no need to do anything for those links.”

Forum discussion at X.

Note: This was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today, I am currently offline for Passover.