October 2022 spam update: dates, what changed and what to do

What Google changed#

The October 2022 spam update was an improvement to Google’s automated spam detection. The Search Status Dashboard entry says only that “this update is global and affects all languages.” Google did not publish a Search Central blog post naming the kinds of spam it targeted.

Google’s general description of spam updates is that its automated systems run constantly, and it calls “notable improvements to how they work” a spam update. Its example is SpamBrain, its AI-based spam-prevention system, which it improves from time to time “to help ensure it catches new types of spam.”

When it rolled out#

The dashboard says the incident began on 19 October 2022 and that the rollout was complete as of 21 October 2022, a two-day run in US/Pacific time. The entries are timestamped 22 March 2023, when Google added ranking updates to the dashboard.

No other confirmed update overlapped it. The September 2022 core and product reviews updates had both finished on 26 September 2022, and the December 2022 helpful content update began on 5 December 2022.

What is known about its impact#

Google published no impact figures for this update. Its 2022 webspam report gave year-level numbers only: SpamBrain “detected 5 times more spam sites compared to 2021,” and Google said more than 99% of visits from Search were spam-free. Those figures cover the whole year, not this update. Treat any percentage attributed to this update alone as a third-party estimate.

What site owners should do#

Google’s guidance for spam updates is short:

• Review Google’s spam policies and make sure the site complies with them. The policies cover cloaking, doorway abuse, hacked content, link spam, scaled content abuse, scraping and more.
• Expect a lag. Google says changes may help “if our automated systems learn over a period of months” that the site complies.
• Check for hacked pages and injected code, since hacked content is listed in the spam policies.
• Check the Manual actions report in Search Console, since human review can also act on spam.

How to check whether it affected you#

A two-day rollout makes the change easy to date. In Search Console, compare clicks for the week before 19 October 2022 with the week starting 28 October 2022, one week after completion. A sustained step on 19 to 21 October is more likely tied to this update than to the September 2022 updates, which ended on 26 September. The Google Algorithm Updates timeline lists every confirmed update with its dates.

Related updates#

• The November 2021 spam update was the general spam update before it.
• The October 2023 spam update was the next one.
• The December 2022 link spam update targeted link spam two months later.