During the Lets Talk About Ranking Updates podcast recorded in August of this year, Google’s Danny Sullivan apologized to website owners who thought there were too many updates to Google’s ranking systems. It seemed to be a strange thing to say at the time because there had only been three official updates in 2023 up to that point. But there have now been 4 more official updates in 40 days. He obviously knew what was coming!
Unfortunately, the backlog in updates means that, like last year, Google has released two updates simultaneously. If you saw ranking drops for keywords in SEOPress Insights during October, it may be difficult to know exactly which update has caused this problem (it could be the October 2023 Core Update or the October 2023 Spam Update). Reports suggest that many sites have been impacted, losing positions in Google and traffic. If your site is one of those hit by these updates, there are offers of help and advice from the experts below.
October 4th – Spam Update
Google released a Spam Update on October 4th. The update was announced on X, in the Google Search Status Dashboard and it was featured in the October 2023 Spam Update blog post on written by Duy Nguyen. The post explains that this update addresses many spam types such as cloaking, hacked, auto-generated, and scraped spam.
It suggests that website owners hit by this update check Google’s spam policies (where these spam types are explained) and the help page about Spam Updates, Google Search spam updates and your site. It also said that the update addresses spam reported by community members in Turkish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Hindi, Chinese, and other languages. Danny Sullivan later confirmed, via the Google Search Liaison account on X, that the update will affect ranking in all languages including English. Duy finished the post by inviting users to contribute to the fight against spam by sending feedback using the spam report form.
The Spam Update finished rolling out on October 20th.
October 5th – October Core Update
On October 5th, less than a month after the last Core Update finished rolling out, Google released a new one and did so simultaneously with the October 2023 Spam Update. This means that if you experienced rank changes in October 2023 you will have to guess which update may have caused that rank change. Sites with a lot of machine-generated content may have been hit by both.
Google’s Danny Sulivan advised on X that “anyone trying to understand the changes, it’s pretty straightforward. If you don’t spam, and see changes, then it might be the core update. If you do spam and see changes, it’s probably the spam update.”
The update was announced on X and in the Google Search Status Dashboard.
SERP trackers showed volatility in ranking from October 7th to October 11th, again from October 14th to October 15th and again on October 20th. The core update stopped rolling out on October 19th but in the article Google Search Algorithm Ranking Update October 25 (Unconfirmed), Barry Schwartz hypothesized that volatility on October 20th and after could be “tremors” from the Core Update or the Spam Update.
Barry judges Google updates by volatility in ranking tools and reaction on webmaster forums. He noted immense volatility, heated chatter and an insane number of comments on his own articles about the Core Update. These adjectives all suggest that this was an important update, impacting a lot of sites.
Marie Haynes also wrote on October 16th that she was “starting to look at analytics and the core update has been devastating to many sites. Feels like more than usual to me so far.” As with the Helpful Content Update, she is inviting website owners to submit their sites to her if they think they were hit by this update.
Halloween and the fear of Google Updates
For Halloween on October 31st, Aleyda Solis told us her Worst SEO Horror Stories in 2023 and How to Wake Up from these Nightmares.
By analyzing social media, she spotted 4 main worries among the SEO community.
- The uncertainty of Google generative search
- The unpredictability of Google core updates
- Overlooking configurations affecting crawlability and indexability
- Lack of SEO validation of Web migrations
She details these 4 fears in the article and plots them by their potential effect and our level of control over them.
The main takeaway here is that you can address your fears by taking action, but that some problems are more actionable than others. Rather than worrying about Core Updates, website owners are encouraged to work towards making their sites Core-Update-proof by optimizing pages so that they become the best answers on the web. For those searching for help optimizing for Quality, Helpfulness and Experience, she offers her free Google’s Content Quality [E-EAT], Helpfulness and Page Experience Questions self-assessment spreadsheet. She recommends that sites that suspect they were hit by the October 2023 Core Update go through these questions to help understand what has happened.
For the future of search integrating AI-generated responses, she points us to Michael King’s much cited article published this month by Search Engine Land: How Search Generative Experience works and why retrieval-augmented generation is our future. This is a suggested read for those who want to learn more about Google’s SGE and anticipate the threat it holds for SEO. It is a long read to scare you to death on Halloween!
Killer Whale Update, Google Knowledge Graph
In the blog post Inside Google’s massive 2023 E-E-A-T Knowledge Graph update, Jason Barnard described what he has nicknamed the “Killer Whale Update” to Google’s Knowledge Graph (this harks back to when Google updates had cooler names). This update is ongoing since July 2023, but he believes that it is strongly related to Core Updates including the October 2023 Core Update.
Jason explains that Google has been improving its Knowledge Graph, moving away from dependence on Wikipedia for information on people and places. He has particularly noted that Google has increased the number of people recognized as entities and that it has improved the classification of these people. One classification of a person, “writer”, could very well be linked to the evaluation of expertise of authors cited on websites. Jason suggests that people who take notice of the subtitle Google gives them in the Knowledge Panel should be pleased if they have been given the title “writer” during recent updates. He believes that content written by a recognized writer may have improved ranking after the Core Update.
Vehicle Listing structured data
On October 16th, Google announced an important development for car dealerships in the US (like Phil our fictive case study example in An Image Can Sell a Thousand Cars). They now have the possibility to feature un vehicle listings on search results using the Vehicle listing (Car) structured data rather than providing a feed via the Vehicle listing partner portal.
To help monitor markup issues Google has added a new “Vehicle listings” report to Google Search Console and has also added support for Car markup in Rich Results Test tool.
Full details from Google in the blog post Vehicle listing structured data for car dealerships. It is interesting to note that this article has already been translated into a number of languages. Although Vehicle listings are only currently available in English search results in the US, could the early translation of these articles suggest that the feature is coming to the rest of the World soon?
Google Search News October ’23 video
On October 5th, Google released the “Google Search News October ‘23” video on YouTube with John Mueller as the sole anchorman again. Released early October, this mainly covers Google updates from August and September, but also has some evergreen advice on subjects like structured data, redirections and duplicate content.
