Google has announced that the October 2023 spam update has finished rolling out. It took 15 days, 12 hours for the rollout to complete. This spam update was the first of this year, with the last spam update happening exactly a year ago – October 2022.
The October 2023 spam update was applied globally and improved coverage in many languanges including Turkish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Hindi, Chinese, and other languages. It is expected to reduce the visible spam in search results, particularly when it comes to cloaking, hacked, auto-generated, and scraped spam.
This particular spam update has overlapped with the roll out of the October 2023 Core Update. Google’s Search Liaison responds on X that normally, they try to keep updates apart from each other but it is not always possible. But for anyone trying to understand changes, it’s pretty straight-forward. If you don’t spam, and see changes, then it might be the core update. If you do spam and see changes, it’s probably the spam update.
If your site engages in activities that Google considers spammy such as cloaking, hacked content, auto-generated content, and/or scraped spun content and you have experienced a drop during the roll-out, then you are most probably affected by the spam update.
Check out Google’s Spam policies for more details on what sites and content Google considers as spam.