October 2022 Spam Update

Google announced the rolling out of the spam update, released on  October 19, 2022. The previous spam update was released on November 03, 2021, and many SEOs and webmasters were significantly impacted by the update.

Every once in a while, Google improves the SpamBrain (AI-based spam prevention system) to detect spam within webpages easily. However, this update is global and will affect all languages and regions. The rollout was completed on October 21, 2022.

Google’s Official Announcement

Google announced this update on Twitter, linking to Google’s Ranking updates release history page. Here is the announcement:

Today we released the October 2022 spam update. Find out more about spam updates at https://t.co/XthD5GF06M . We'll update our ranking release history page when the rollout is complete: https://t.co/sQ5COfvo3J

— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) October 19, 2022

What Are People Saying?

Many SEOs took to Twitter to give their insights about the Google spam update. Check out the spam update quick facts shared by search geek Barry Schwartz.

Google October 2022 spam update quick facts – for more details see https://t.co/76qn48VPt2 pic.twitter.com/3glNQzG5zb

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) October 20, 2022

What’s Next – Dealing With This Update

Google rewards the sites that provide the best content and good user experience by following the best practices conveyed in Google Search Essentials.

If you follow the best practices in Google Search Essentials, you don’t need to worry more about the spam update. However, look at your site’s securities and look for any possible signs of attacks. The vulnerabilities in the site’s security gave hackers to gain access to your website and might inject malicious content into your website. 

When Google finds any form of spam content on your website, it demotes your site’s content in search results or even removes it from Google’s index. Be sure to check and remove spam content from your website (if any). 

Once spam updates negatively impact the website, it takes months to recover from it.