Google announced the October 2023 spam update on the Search Central blog on 4th Oct. It marked it complete on the Search Status Dashboard on 20th Oct 2023, after 15 days and 12 hours.
Google said the release improved its spam detection systems' coverage across many languages and spam types. It expected the update "to reduce the visible spam in search results, particularly when it comes to cloaking, hacked, auto-generated, and scraped spam."
The update was unusually community-driven.
Google said it aimed to "clean up several types of spam that our community members reported in Turkish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Hindi, Chinese, and other languages," in a post by search quality analyst Duy Nguyen.
The post thanked users who filed spam reports for helping the team prioritize and validate its work.
Google also noted it was already working on the next spam update.
The October 2023 core update ran almost exactly in parallel (5th to 19th Oct). That muddied attribution for sites that moved in mid-October.
Search Engine Land flagged the point when the spam rollout finished.
Unlike a core update, a spam demotion leaves something concrete to do. Review Google's spam policies, remove the violating behavior, and be patient.
Google's spam updates help page says changes may help a site improve if its systems "learn over a period of months that the site complies" with the policies.
