Google has rolled out an anti-spam update on November 3, 2021, and the update will be fully rolled-out within a week. While the exact details of the update are not disclosed yet, webmasters are encouraged to follow the best search practices.
This update is a part of Google’s continuing measures to eliminate spam from search results. And it’s worth noting that we’ve already seen three spam updates this calendar year (Link spam update, Anti-Spam Update I, and Anti-Spam Update II).
Google’s Official Announcement
Google’s Danny Sullivan took to Twitter to announce the roll-out of the new anti-spam update, which is expected to be fully rolled out in a week’s time.
As part of our regular work to improve results, we've released a spam update to our systems. This November 2021 spam update should be fully rolled out within a week. We encourage sites to follow our best practices for Search: https://t.co/jK3ArQmTqT
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) November 3, 2021
Understanding Spam Update
Spam updates, in general, are different from core updates. While core updates assess the content overall, spam updates target only the sites that don’t follow the search engine’s guidelines, and this is confirmed by Google’s Danny Sullivan as well. Hence we could expect there will not be overall drastic changes with SERP during the roll-out of this update except for websites that are trying to spam their way to the top.
Spam updates deal with content that doesn't follow our guidelines.
Core updates are simply an adjustment to how we assess content overall.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) November 4, 2021
What’s Next – How to Deal with Spam Update?
While Google has not released any specific guidelines related to this spam update, instead, they’ve linked to their general webmaster guidelines. But within a few days after the update started rolling out, Glenn Gabe has noticed spam pages being deindexed from search results, notably, the sites that have cloaked spam content with injected links.
It’s also worth noting that earlier this year, Google had reported the rise of hacked spam (websites being hacked to spread spam and malicious content), and any affected sites are considered no different from spam sites, and this spam update is likely to eliminate these sites from search results.
So starting this week, if you notice a drop in your traffic, we recommend you take a look at your site’s security for any kind of attacks and improve your site’s security measures. In the unlikely case that your website gets compromised, here is a detailed resource from Google on the security measures you’ll need to take.
Note: The roll-out of this anti-spam update concluded on November 11, 2021.
This update is complete.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) November 11, 2021
