October 2023 spam update: dates, what changed and what to do

What Google changed#

Google announced the October 2023 spam update on 4 October 2023 as an update to its spam detection systems “that will improve our coverage in many languages and spam types.” Its Search Central post said the update aimed to clean up spam that community members reported in “Turkish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Hindi, Chinese, and other languages.”

Google said it expected the update to reduce visible spam in search results, “particularly when it comes to cloaking, hacked, auto-generated, and scraped spam.” The dashboard entry added that the update “applies globally.”

When it rolled out#

The Google Search Status Dashboard logged the release on 4 October 2023 at 09:52 PDT and records the end at 22:15 PDT on 19 October 2023, a 15-day rollout in Pacific time. Google’s completion note says the rollout “was complete as of October 20, 2023,” which is already 20 October in most other time zones.

The October 2023 core update started one day later, on 5 October, and finished on 19 October 2023. The two rollouts overlapped almost exactly, so a ranking change in that window may come from either.

What is known about its impact#

Google did not publish impact figures for this update. Its standing explanation is that sites which violate its spam policies “may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all.” Treat any percentage you see attributed to this update as a third-party estimate, and check its method.

What site owners should do#

Google’s post said sites that see a change after a spam update “should review our spam policies.” The ones most relevant to this update:

• Cloaking: never show search engines different content from what users see.
• Hacked content: check for content or code placed on the site without permission.
• Auto-generated pages now fall under scaled content abuse: many pages made mainly to rank.
• Scraping: hosting content taken from other sites to manipulate rankings is a violation.
• Expect recovery to be slow: Google says systems may need months to learn the site now complies.

How to check whether it affected you#

In Search Console, set the Performance report to cover September to November 2023 and compare clicks for the week before 4 October with the week starting 27 October. Check the Security issues and Manual actions reports as well, since hacked spam was one of the targets. The Google Algorithm Updates timeline lists every confirmed update with its dates, including the overlapping core update.

Related updates#

• The October 2023 core update overlapped this rollout.
• The October 2022 spam update was the spam update before it.
• The March 2024 spam update was the next one.