Google Search Central announced the release of their October 2022 spam update on Twitter. This global spam update improves Google’s spam detection strategies, and affects all languages.
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This update started rolling out on October 19, 2022, at about 11 am ET and was expected to take about a week to fully roll out. However, it was completed on October 21, 2022, at about 5 am ET. It took just less than about 42 hours. Search Engine Land says that if websites notice large ranking or traffic changes in their organic Google search results, they may have been hit by this spam update.
With this October 2022 spam update, the company will penalize spam techniques that are against their spam policies.
The previous update was on November 2021, 11 months ago (rollout completed as of November 11, 2021. Other spam updates were on July 26, 2021(rollout completed as of August 24, 2021), June 28, 2021 (second part of the June 2021 spam update, rollout was completed same day) and June 23, 2021 (rollout was completed later that same day).
With each update, Google aims at providing each user with the most useful and relevant information. The major focus is to maintain the quality of its search results.As spam sites can harm or mislead people, Google invests in automated systems to ensure that sites don’t rise in Search results through deceptive or manipulative behavior. Google has reported that in 2020 alone, its systems found 40 billion spammy pages every day.
Spam updates are designed to improve Google’s automated systems that are constantly running in the background to detect spam in search results. Spam updates also target phishing scams on the web that try to rank in search results by posing as highly relevant pages.
What Google Says About October 2022 Spam Update?
Google says that, “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.”
Spam sites try to reach the top of Search results through diverse techniques such as repeating keywords over and over, or showing Google content that’s different from what users see.
Google Search Essentials will provide details on the spam policies. This category covers behaviors and tactics that can lead to a page or website getting ranked lower or de-indexed from Google Search.
Google’s spam policies include cloaking, doorways, hacked content, hidden text and links, keyword stuffing, link spam, machine-generated traffic, malware and malicious behaviors, misleading functionality, scraped content, sneaky redirects, spammy automatically-generated content, thin affiliate pages, user-generated spam, copyright-removal requests, online harassment removals, as well as scam and fraud. Other types of spam include phishing scams and websites disguising themselves as other reputable sites.
In spam updates like the October 2022 spam update, hacked spam or intentional spam are all the same. Hacked websites aren’t treated any different.
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As Google said, “Search is a powerful tool. It helps people find, share and access an amazing wealth of content regardless of how they connect or where they are located.” It added,”We work hard to ensure that you see high-quality Search results and not spam. We’re continuously improving our spam-fighting technology and will continue working closely with webmasters and others to foster and support a high-quality web ecosystem.”
When it comes to content spam, it is negative SEO method. It refers to any unauthorized use of content from one’s own website on third-party websites. Spammers often target strong websites in certain niches. Content spam can be identified by analyzing ranking losses, and conducting SEO audits.
| Also read Take a Look at 3 New LinkedIn Updates to Pages Google Completes Rolling Out Their September Core & Product Reviews Updates |
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