Google October 2022 Spam Update

[rustybrick]

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

[twitter.com...]

[christianz]

Repetitive , spun, "evergreen" content websites got the nerfbat from where I am seeing it.

Spun should be penalized. Repetitive and evergreen are exactly what users want and need in some verticals/niches. Thin content also is good and the only type of content that makes sense for these verticals.

Dumb Google AI, of course, doesn't understand the difference. After all, it has no real intelligence or understanding.

[abcdefg]

We shouldn't blame the AI. People made the AI as it is and they seem to enjoy the results.

We can deduce that the people making the AI would have manually tweaked the results this way, too.

[christianz]

We shouldn't blame the AI. People made the AI as it is and they seem to enjoy the results.

There is nothing enjoyable about irrelevant search results.

[abcdefg]

You're right. Their revenues bombed. But with their management style, I'm certain this is the direction they're going.

In 5 years, they'll probably become AOL / Yahoo, probably more Yahoo than AOL.

[southernguy]

Yes, you are right abcdefg I have been badly damaged by their algorithms like many others here, but it is nice to see that eventually, they will get what's coming to them.

Fortunately for me, I have had more search traffic from other sources, and even though less, it has been converting much better than Google traffic for the last year or so.

[phranque]

Their revenues bombed.

Q3 2022 earnings were just reported and revenue was actually up 6% (YOY) for the quarter.

[edited by: phranque at 11:07 pm (utc) on Oct 26, 2022]

[christianz]

Speaking of irrelevance: I entered "october spam update" in Google News tab and I got:

Relevant articles in English, German and French
Thin "article" in Russian referring to original article in Search Engine Land
News article about some new phones on phone review site
News article about Elon Musk Twitter deal
Article about Vodafone UK becoming first broadband ISP to launch WiF
Article in Manila Times about some financial app improving security
Couple more relevant articles in different languages
Article about Covid 19 vaccine update from gov.uk
3 more pages from gov.uk about taxes and NHS pension scheme (I am not that old and not from UK btw lol)
More nonsense about Covid and Monkeypox
Etc etc tec

I understand, this is not very newsy topic and there is not that many viable articles for something so specific and niche. But why 4 different languages? And surely, why taxes and Covid?

[edited by: christianz at 11:03 pm (utc) on Oct 26, 2022]

[christianz]

revenue was actually up 6% (YOY) for the quarter

That's the scary part. Ad RPMs in AdSense and in broader industry paid out to publishers are down at least 20% YoY. So where did that +6% come from?

[robzilla]

There is nothing enjoyable about irrelevant search results.

Their point was that Search is data-driven. Before an update rolls out, Google has already confirmed that its effect on user satisfaction is positive.

And surely, why taxes and Covid?

As soon as content stops floating up for the (as you say, rather "niche") combination of "october spam update", search engines will often drop a keyword to show more hopefully relevant results. Compare the results of "october spam update" and "october update" and you'll see it in action. Of course, "october update" is a rather vague query, so you'll get a wide variety of results. We've had monthly covid updates for a few years now, I'm not surprised one would surface for that query.

Ad RPMs in AdSense and in broader industry paid out to publishers are down at least 20% YoY.

Source? Mine are up by about 15-20%.

[phranque]

Source?

that was my thought - i didn't think they were so transparent about those numbers...

[igomyway]

My site is about tech guides and it has dropped almost 90% after this update. It's really a nightmare to me. After reading the posts above, I have great sympathy for those who are in the same boat as me. Looks like news and tech sites got hit really bad.

[abcdefg]

Anything where the business model is obvious is their target.

The most protected topics are probably superstition, flat earth, alien / ufo.

Last quarter, G revenue 69.68b; this quarter, 69.09b. Stock price crashed 10% in a day.

[Nutterum]

Had an interesting conversation with some colleagues operating US and UK casino site affiliates. Big players with 200k+ organic traffic on the weekly. All of them saw drops and shared that these drops came mainly from their link-building campaigns that placed content on less than ideal "news" websites. Be aware folks. Google is re-evaluating the link juice coming from sites flagged as unhelpful to a much greater degree. Im talking 40%+ organic traffic down. Prepare your disavow lists early as this update has not rolled out in full yet!

[christianz]

Source? Mine are up by about 15-20%.

Ezoic ad revenue index and my own statistics, including AdSense and alternatives (not Ezoic). AdSense is only small part of my overall revenue. But all seems to be consistently down in terms of RPMs.

Depends on niche and type of site/audience, of course. But on average, publishers are getting substantial haircut while Google somehow increased their revenue by 6%.

Add these massive traffic bleeds and drops (that still show no sign of stopping) and you can get an idea of how mine and other small publisher revenue looks like right now.

[Dimitri]

I wonder if publishers impacted by this update, are involved in actively getting backlinks.

[christianz]

I wonder if publishers impacted by this update, are involved in actively getting backlinks.

Noup. Never bought or "built" a single backlink in 17 years that I have operated my oldest site. Yet, I have tens of thousands of bad backlinks from:

1. Cloaked doorway pages (that only show for googlebot)
2. Pages on hacked sites (www.some-unaware-hacked-site.com/<random letters>/<direct keywords that I rank for>.html that contain keyword soup and link to my site and some other sites
3. Image scraper spam galleries (including ~10000 blogspot spam "blogs")
4. AI generated gibberish sites
5. Scraper sites with stolen and spun articles
6. Classic "white noise" type spammy domain directories (.tw etc)

And all kinds of other junk. I believe I even saw a fake forum, built on one of the popular forum engines but populated with 100s of thousands of AI generated posts in foreign language.

YET. I believe most sites with age similar to mine are in similar situation. I am not convinced Google is demoting my site because of links, but it is one of the possibilities.

[Dimitri]

I believe most sites with age similar to mine are in similar situation.

I confirm. My main site exists since 1994, more than a million of this kind of junk backinks.

10 years ago, I started to block and filter the access to my pages, which greatly reduced scrapping and toxic backlinks.

[RedBar]

FWIW I've been seeing consistent traffic for the last 3 days "looking" much like it used to do pre-May.

[Tambran]

Relevant quote from Elon Musk today in message to Twitter advertisers: "Low relevancy ads are spam, but highly relevant ads are actually content!"

[Broaster]

Well this rollercoaster of updates has destroyed my 10 year old sports blog, in the end of 2019 and most of 2020 my website saw a surge I was finally able to get traffic again not since 2012 when my website was hit hard and didnt recover, I was in google discover and in google news top stories

then the core web vitals came and my website stopped getting traffic from google news and discover, my website failed to pass the core web vitals even though it was mobile friendly all because of a slight content shift when going to the site.

That was in summer of 2021, and then these last few months are insane, this spam update hit and now I publish a new news article or update and barely get 10 visits an hour.

I noticed that on google Top Stories carousel its the same few websites in there even for multiple articles getting showcased these websites are making a lot of money while the rest of us get scraps, our livelihood doesnt matter the independent sites are going under because little to no traffic means no $$$ and then you have to find another job after years of making this your livelihood.

[luckyfellow]

Anyone know if redirecting the old pages to a new domain might help with anything :l

[Broaster]

Redirecting old pages to a new domain sounds like trickery and Google doesnt like that

[Nutterum]

Redirecting old pages to new domain work in moderation. Few highly relevant or evergreen content pages can work, as well as contact or similar baseline information pages. Try to do anything more and you will get hit by the spam filter sooner rather than later.

[ivok]

Broaster + - could you please let me know how did you get on Google Discover? I'm getting featured there on a random occasion, so I can't figure it out. Please let me know these:
1. Your domain authority
2. How many new posts are you publishing daily
3. Are CWV related as you mentioned that when you are not passing the scores you are not featured there.
4. What is the schema markup for the posts that are getting featured ( Article, News Article, Blog Posting )
5. Any other thing that I probably don't know but you think might have an impact

Thanks

[morpheus83]

I may be wrong, but Google does understand that is just not possible for a site owner to control the websites that link to it. Over the years we have got tens of thousands of crappy links from blogspot, from asian websites etc etc. Yes, disavowing is an option but it is just not possible to do it regularly.

Curious to know if anyone here has actively disavowed crappy incoming domains and seen a change in rankings.

[christianz]

@morpheus83

The question is not whether Google demotes sites with lots of crappy backlinks. We all know that all aged sites have them. The question is whether or not Google demotes sites with crappy backlinks of which some look like site owner may have bought or created himself. Or sites that have, let's say, 10 times more crappy backlinks than the average site.

As long as they penalize or demote sites due to links at all, crappy spam backlinks can always potentially be cause of this. Looking at competitors backlink profiles will not give you all the info you need , because you don't know how many and if any domains they have disavowed.

[morpheus83]

@christianz

Its very tricky to understand which links have been bought by the owner. And if Google determines the number of links as per an average site in the same category, all someone has to do to ruin a competitor's website is buy a crap load of links on fiverr or other link farms.

[anubitez]

Seems on blackhatworld forums people talking about another unconfirmed update on the 28th, seems a few got hit, so it is likely they revising or still processing this spam update. Seems some recovery posts going on, I got a strange update. All my keywords are back on rank 1 or in prime positions, knocked out some of those copycats that steal my stuff again (yay), but I am getting no impressions or clicks, I asked some people from all over the world in English-speaking countries to search, it appears for them so I am unsure why they have returned to front spot but getting no impressions or clicks when before I was getting up to 30k to 50k a day from google legit traffic, now its like 3k? this is beyond odd now, almost trolling.

[Treud]

I saw some changes as well on the 28th, let's wait a few days to see how it moves. It's Halloween, so change of user behaviour.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

- In my niche Youtube gained monumental amounts of visibility this "spam" update.

- I can't log in to Search Console or Adsense without getting hit with a Youtube cookie.

- In the last quarterly financial reports the forward looking statements were heavily about plans for Youtube.

- Youtube is invested heavily in "shorts" incl promotion, a shorts only tab and more revenue for shorts creators.

I don't know, it's hard to see, but maybe the update had something to do with Youtube, lol.

Dear G, please RELAX about Youtube, everyone knows it's there.