Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update On October 22, A Day After The October ’22 Spam Update Finished?

So we had Google confirm that the October 2022 spam update finished Friday morning, the morning of October 21st. The tracking tools and chatter were somewhat mild but that makes sense for a spam update. But the day after, on Saturday, October 22nd, I see renewed chatter, and the tools show much bigger swings in the Google search rankings.

It is either that Google pushed out a new update, unrelated to the spam update, or Google told us the spam update was done before it was really done. Or maybe we have no clue what we are doing or tracking or studying and Google is toying with us all. It can also be that all the tools were delayed in their reporting by a day or more.

Google Tracking Tools

Here are screenshots from the automated Google tracking tools showing the movement being picked up a day or so after the Spam update completed.

Semrush:

RankRanger:

Mozcast:

SERP Metrics:

Advanced Web Rankings:

Cognitive SEO:

Algoroo:

Accuranker:

SEO Chatter

Now, on the SEO chatter side, you have a ton of confusion. People are thinking they were hit by the spam update when maybe they were hit by whatever this update was after the spam update. So I am not sure how to isolate just those hit after this spam update to this new update. Or like I said above, maybe the two are related and Google was too quick to say the update was over or the tools were too slow to pick up on that the update was over?

Here is some of the newer chatter from several BlackHat World threads and WebmasterWorld:

It appears we’ve lost around 10% of our search traffic and then I guess because of this supposed spam update.

I lost search rankings plus my new links are not indexing, I’ve tried several times to index from search console to no avail!

I’m 70% down on traffic, and this is genuinely terrifying.

I lost 90% of my traffic. Whitehat site no black hat method used.

My blackhat websites and whitehat websites all lost 90% of traffic, all of them put on same Adsense account, what’s happened?

I can understand about some of my sites are just not good enough and just going down. But this site I have is a 3+-year-old completely normal white hat site, no link building by myself, not trying to fool google, nothing. Today I go to Google Search Console and see this. Thank you, Google.

Guys I don’t know why my traffic drops suddenly. This is so crazy. 🙁 I ordered some guest posts backlinks, which are clean. I don’t know if it is an update. What is this? My website is 5 months old already and getting 80-100 traffic per day but now it has only 8 🙁

my website hit very badly almost 90% traffic dropped

It seemed like this spam update may have been completed on Friday morning but the aftershock from it hit the next day.

Forum discussion at BlackHat World and WebmasterWorld.