Google October 2022 Spam Update

[rustybrick]

It is rolling out now and will take several days to complete

[twitter.com...]

[Markedd]

@aristotle Sorry for being vague. I am talking about tech news + gadget reviews. Think CNET or Techradar types of sites.

[luckyfellow]

@Dimitri No, I don't pay specific attention to word counts, as I followed the Google guidelines that there shouldn't be any specific word count. My focus was on fulfilling the user intent.

[christianz]

I was wondering, are those who are negatively impacted by this update the same ones who are looking to archive a given number of words for their content, no matter how?

No, those are boosted by this update.

[aristotle]

@aristotle Sorry for being vague. I am talking about tech news + gadget reviews. Think CNET or Techradar types of sites.

Thanks for the clarification. I thought you probably didn't really mean all of modern technology. In any case, google has always been suspicious of small reviews sites and small news sites, with good reason in my opinion. Sites in these categories generally tend to have low quality content, which google considers to be a sign of spam. In addition, the owners of many small reviews sites have financial incentives to give good reviews to certain products, which google regards as one of the worst forms of spam.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

If your non-spammy pride and joy lost traffic to a spam update here's a suggestion. Your pagespeed scores will thank you, as will your visitors.

- Remove slow loading adsense to make it a little less spammy.

[anubitez]

While that can seem obvious and a good answer, I disagree strongly, my scores are really good, so I doubt it. Plus, massive sites fail web vitals, some are news sites yet cover all categories, for example, and seem to be fine over niche websites dedicated to that topic with real articles and, information, research.

my tffb from a site like [speedvitals.com...] has me at 93 to 95% in almost all locations given I use full caching edge with Cloudflare, dedicated server, custom stack, optimized MariaDB server, PHP-fpm, nginx, more than any usual person would do with plugins on a WordPress site, optimizing on a backend is the key, along with correct CDN usage and obvious code, lazyloading smartly, image optimization.

also, all the spammy websites, like I keep mentioning have the worse web scores and fail webvitals yet are moving up and taking in some cases top spot. also, they have adsense x 100 ads on each page, literally every 2nd paragraph, it's disgusting. so I think, in my personal opinion it is not an overload of adsense issue, even though I do not even use it.

I wish it was a speed issue, things like this are an easy fix. I spent all Saturday on paid tools like semrush going over things. Honestly, they hardly got any suggestions for my articles since I pass most of their checks, it's like a shrug, small things to improve, more for getting that like 10% extra traffic in their eyes, which of course, may not even work, but, the articles health, layout, words, correct usage of titles, sub-titles, keywords, other content suggestions is high quality already.

I use Grammarly pro for spell checking and plagiarism check, and occasionally run articles on other tools to check once a month or so. I am just waiting now, and I cannot see how I am pinged unless Google has royally screwed it, or they are indexing the scrapers before mine and then penalizing me for spam, if that is true is google screwing it again, like I said before half of them use the images from my article, yet think they are original? wow if so hah.

I will also mention that those manual copycats are taking more of my articles and re-posting on Saturday as well, getting the top spot or top 5 at least, where mine have disappeared from 1 to 5. one site copies my entire text from top to bottom and gets new images that are not even related to the subject mostly, just vague image, with 3x more ads.........................................

I am waiting until Monday afternoon, which will be a key indicator. I will also note Googlebot is slow to visit my website, it's like hardly visits at all, but it is not being blocked or has connection issues since I audited that part as well, which I found odd since it visited my site more than most bots combined for past three years on each given day.

[Markedd]

@aristotle I don't disagree with what you're saying, but this time the problem is widespread enough to shake the big guys as well. Just use semrush to check the two domains I mentioned, especially the latter which lost an incredible amount of traffic the last half a year alone. It's not just the small guys in this niche. I have a feeling that Google wants the tech journalism+reviews to look differently. That or it demands that we start creating budgets for ads otherwise no more organic traffic.

[longjohnbronze]

It appears we've lost around 10% of our search traffic and then I guess because of this supposed spam update.

I don't want to bore anyone here with "we're not spam" - everyone here claims that and I doubt it's true in all cases :-) - but what's the point of this update if this is its effect? Shouldn't it affect traffic either by minus 100% or by plus some percentage? The latter depending on how much spam is being removed from top positions in your respective niche.

EDIT: I should add here that among our various types of landing pages, no pattern is discernible. We have 4 major categories and in all there are winners and losers, but on average mostly losers.

[anubitez]

it is weird, lots of my keywords are still in good serp positions, but do not appear, well for me personally.

some people can see them, some cannot. semrush can see them and have said within 24 hours they have increased in ranking, yet i cannot even find them when i search for them... I am doing better for all those then anyone I compete with also, lots in top 1-3 and top 10 that get me the bulk of my traffic taking the top 100 search queries from Google console.

this update is so odd, i got half a thinking google is doing massive updates and things are jumbled big time until its complete, they said it was complete but i doubt it, as how can some see things and others cannot, and tools can see stats and see things increasing all of a sudden, google search cache? shrug.

i heard back chatter in some SEO places like Reddit communities another unannounced google update just started, but that could be just fairytales.

[RedBar]

@anubitez

An interesting link from SpeedVitals therefore I tested various sites of mine and others. The fascinating thing is that testiing one of the world's top 10 most visited sites, a p0rn site, it scored terribly across all regions for speed. I realise that p0rn sites probably do not rely heavily upon search results, if at all, but if such a site were "so slow", surely it wouldn't be visited so much?

[RedBar]

another unannounced google update just started, but that could be just fairytales.

IIRC there are in excess of 350+ G updates / whatevers a year, that's on average at least one every day. This has been known for several years and I tell you what I'll call, another update on Monday 24th October 2022 somewhere between 00:00:01 and 23:59:59 :-)

[menntarra 34]

Hi everyone,

Maybe this will sound negative and pessimistic but i think it will be a rather realistic opinion.
I used to own 10-20 websites. I had some where i was using unethical techniques but i also had half of them where i never used any such things. I could actually look at them as a test to show that it does not matter, it does not matter at all. When google started these crazy updates (first Panda and then came all the other), my sites got hit too. Some hits made sense while a lot of others did not. Over the years i came to the realisation that if you don't put money into google's pockets and/or if you are a small player you will gonna get hit and destroyed. The only question is when. If you want traffic you have to be part of the "game". Simply providing good useful content is not gonna generate revenue to google so you will eventually get demoted. Google is saying the intent is to improve the quality of the search right? Then why huge brands with spammy, low quality content hardly ever get hit. The difference is that they put billions into google's pockets. 4 years ago i decided i don't want this stress in my life anymore. With every update my sites went on a roller coaster. It did not matter if the they were maintained ethically or if it was following google guidelines or not...

So 4 years ago I joined a huge corporate company, where i'm building, maintaining some of the company's websites. I see a lot of garbage. Sites structure is against SEO rules, spammy hidden texts, not following guidelines. There is almost no optimization and speed index is very slow. You can see all the weird stuff for which google should penalise. (I'm of course trying to improve everything but it is a long process). The "funny thing" is that none of these websites has ever been hit, and nobody really cares about google here. It does not matter cause they have the money and obviously they are part of the game, they pay millions to google every month.

Either you have a stressful life and your income is in danger every day, or you join the game and pay them. I gave up and joined their game by becoming an employer of a multibillionaire company. I wish good luck to all of those who still haven't been hit and try to provide good content. But those who have been hit and hoping for the next and next and next update to save them, i really advise you if you want a happy life, just save yourself the trouble and give up. This is not being pessimistic but rather a conclusion i came to and freeing myself from the stress.

ps.: reason i looked into this forum now again, is that my last live websites has been hit with this spam update. I haven't touched it for 5 years. It did not have many visitors, but I've been earning small amount from ads. Surprise-surprise: with this spam update it had been hit and I lost 99% of the visitors :D I thoroughly checked each and every recommended google spam policy rule (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies) and haven't found any issues. So i lost 99% but i'm not sad or surprised. Thankfully i quit the game 4 years ago... i'm free!

To all Davids out there: good luck fighting Goliath !

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Judging by what I see in results this morning... some observations

- Update did not hurt sites with duplicate content*
- Update did hurt sites with spun and unhelpful content
- Update did hurt sites linked to from spun and unhelpful content sites, depending on site size and age**

I'd expect to see these things if an update was trying to find and eliminate private blog networks. It's interesting that duplicate content was not part of the update, but spun content was. A purely duplicate page would not rank due to other Google filters but a spun page might and this update reinforced the detection of spun content.

*Pages with 90% duplicate content that are able to get past other filters and get indexed were entirely unaffected by this update.
**New sites or sites that made a lot of recent changes triggering a reset on trust got hit hardest.

[aristotle]

Markedd wrote:
check the two domains I mentioned, especially the latter which lost an incredible amount of traffic the last half a year alone

I just looked at the latter (techradar.com), and was soon greeted by a big popup that froze the rest of the page and asked for my email. I didn't see a way to close the popup, so I reloaded the page and quickly clicked a couple of internal links to start exploring the site.

It certainly is a big site, so it's odd that I had never heard of it before. At any rate, I can see how google might not like parts of it. I found this quote on one of the pages:

We also need to pay our teams and website costs so we make money in a number of ways. We sometimes use affiliate links to products and services on retailer sites for which we can receive compensation if you click on those links or make purchases through them. From time to time we also publish advertorials (paid-for editorial content) and sponsored content on the site. When this is the case the content is clearly marked as sponsored or promoted, so you’ll always know which content is editorial and which is not.

Even if these pages are clearly marked, their content itself might well be judged as spam, and this content is part of the site..

Actually google has demoted many large sites over the years. Old-timers here may remember the original rollout of Panda in 2011, which probably destroyed more websites than any other "update" in google's history, and many of those were very large sites.

Anyway I could say more about this all of this, but I've run out of time.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

The Oct updates are becoming notorious for helping one company and sinking another, neither of which did anything wrong.

[anubitez]

Why can't John and his team not create AI learning by the following?

Big AI scrapers hotlink all images. Flag 1.
Google sees all posts with 90% hotlink images, flags the images. Flag 2.
Visits the domain where the images are and finds the same images on same article, finding that its original since its the same content, context and images are from that domain obviously. Flag 3.
AI by Spamfartbrain then notices this is occurring from this 1 domain multiple times, flag 4 > 75% spam website
AI by Spamfartbrain then notices more domains this is occuring - 99.99% spam website, blacklist send a notification to google search console for the owner to fix or explain why.

This would reduce a good deal of spam, then it will be more costly for the AI spam since they need to self-create it using AI still, change more things, it still can be done but not as easy, and again more services involved means more money they outlay first for maybe some profit.

This also will not fix manual copycats either, but still, it will reduce a lot, and by a fair margin, since its ai auto scraping content that is out of control lets be honest, if it was not for that it would be more tolerable, you cannot remove things all together, but with whatever they are doing, its wrecking so many legit websites its beyond silly now and obviously some ai spun sites are increasing and in ranking after these updates, that is a dead giveaway Google is broken, yet they believe they are correct.

Scarey...


Update - I noticed my traffic is not too shabby right now, my keywords have not dropped, some increased, some that are ranking well i cannot see for some reason, but Google is scraping a ton of data off me in past several hours, now the usual traffic trend returning minus maybe 35 to 40% which is better than 95%.

In about 6 hours Google historically turns the taps back on for me, my site is dead on weekends and spikey, weekdays is when I get the big bulk of traffic, it is like clockwork, has been for years so I will know more soon, but this is better than Thursday/Friday.

[ChokenBako]

Maybe i am a little bit too positive, but after the Spam Update was done i saw these changes:

-15% in overall traffic

But the traffic is way more better. More interaeactions and inquiries as before the update.

[anubitez]

I noticed this too; for me, it is ads, CPM, and RPM is better, almost triple traffic, even though still gutted by 60 to 70% instead of 90% now. So income wise I have taken 20% to 40% hit, instead of 60 to 90% like my traffic.

Still see the manual copycats each day, taking more of my old articles that have been deindexed for alleged spam and reposting them, just changing the pictures to ones that make no sense, ranking in the top 1-3 spots where I was. This is making my heart break during this episode; if they got removed entirely, I would be happy to be caught up in some posts. Still, they are stealing what google deems spam, posting word for word, changing images that make no sense, having 200% more ads and poor speeds, and making money off my hard work... If I keep seeing this, I may need to buy some cheap keyboards temporarily. Besides having heartbreak, I think soon steam will be coming out of my ears with laser beams from my eyes, especially when I remember John. M is saying to stop making spam if penalized... John M the ultimate troll in 2022, in my opinion.

Anyway, best of luck to all in the recovery if it occurs.

[aristotle]

Reminder:
If scrapers of your content are ranking higher than your originals, oftentimes it means that your site has been hit by a google algorithmic penalty.

[ChokenBako]

@anubitez+ i am in the same boat. Two years ago my whole site was scraped and performed better on a nonsense domain (but strong backlinks) than mine. It was hit by every Google update a bit, but they made a lot of money with my stolen content....

[RedBar]

Are most of these movements / downgrades aimed specifically at G US search?

My global .com is running steady and where I would normally expect it to be however my UK focussed hotel functions site is running well-ahead of where I would expect it to "normally" be. In fact today it has already achieved its guesstimated monthly visitor levels and, as such, if it continues this way I'm going to have to increase its monthly forecast by 20%. In the previous 17 years traffic has reduced until mid-December.

Ok, the hotel has a good reputation for everything, accommodation, food, drinks, live music, functions but it is a small hotel in a market town therefore there is an absolute maximum for which it can comfortably cope. It does have quite a few competitors, it is definitely not the sole supplier!

Maybe because it's a local business it does not see any spam opposition either on the very local or regional level and at a regional level it is the second largest in the UK.

Insofar as my global site is concerned for the big keywords I am still seeing the G US SERPs favouring US companies v foreign ones however with very little spam.

Therefore back to my question, is this spam update a US-focussed attempt at specific widget sectors?

[robzilla]

Are most of these movements / downgrades aimed specifically at G US search?

Updates don't usually target specific countries. Some are English-first, like the helpful content update, or target specific languages, but most updates are rolled out globally.

[abcdefg]

Wonderful update. My main site lost 95% of impressions and 90% of traffic from G immediately.

I guess it is a sort of "spam" just like my other sites.

Big biz and approved politicians are the authoritative voices.

[luckyfellow]

Does anyone have any updates on what this update was about and possible ways to fix it? Is it even recoverable?

[Robera]

I was absolutely destroyed by this update. We should wait some time before trying to fix something, however, nobody still knows if it's more targeted to links or content.

[1ncom1ng]

Most of the YMYL niches of Australia/Germany/Brazil of my projects dropped traffic near 45% after 21 Oct. But now it's recovering slowly.

[renatovieira]

The drop has been huge since yesterday. Looks like today will be worse. This update is being killer!

[robzilla]

The drop has been huge since yesterday.

The spam update finished rolling out 4-5 days ago. Whatever you're seeing now is probably unrelated.

[Nutterum]

The update weights content over links 100% . Cant really tell the ratio, but Repetitive , spun, "evergreen" content websites got the nerfbat from where I am seeing it. SERPs however do show more google properties in the top 3 at the same time, which hurts the non penalized websites making it overall the same or slight loss for the latter. Pure e-commerce websites suffer from links they bought to 2nd tier news websites and/or link farms. That I can guarantee.

[luckyfellow]

@renatovieira this update is absolutely devastating. My whitehat website is wiped out with no explanation. Thousands of hours of work gone on a whim by Google. 80-90% traffic drop.