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Google is constantly updating and improving its best practices to maintain its place in the industry as a leader in providing quality information and user experience. Over the past month, Google has rolled out two new updates for October: the spam update and the core update. These updates are surprisingly large and may affect your site rankings and could alter aspects of your website’s visibility and traffic.

The Core Update

Google’s October 2023 Core Update, the third core update this year, began rolling out on October 5th and has finished being implemented as of October 19th, two weeks later. This core update will likely change how many websites rank and may cause changes to several other aspects of your site’s visibility.

Google algorithm updates are essential to track when your business’s ability to generate leads is on the line. Even if an update does not directly affect your site, it could affect the sites above or below you in rankings, which would, in turn, affect where you stand.

Google’s core updates are made of small fixes to the algorithm that ultimately demote lower-quality or less-relevant sites on many keyword search results and promote the more appropriate sites. The goal is to improve user experience on their search engine, as it is with all Google updates.

The Spam Update

Google’s October 2023 Spam Update was designed to improve the search engine’s capabilities across multiple languages and clean up several types of reported spam. The update was made on October 4th, 2023, and slowly rolled out over the course of last month. If you noticed or are noticing changes in where your site ranks over these few weeks, and if your site is not primarily in English, this update could be why.

Google has been targeting auto-generated content, cloaking, hacking, and scraping content across many languages, including Vietnamese, Turkish, Hindi, Chinese, Indonesian, and others. This is likely to change the landscape of the SERP for many.

The Impact of the Two Updates

Google has been raising its standards on SEO and will continue to do so as the top internet search engine. As the content on the internet changes and evolves, especially surrounding AI tech and ever-improving search algorithms, it is important to make sure your site stays at its current rank and sets sights on moving up by implementing best SEO practices. Keeping up with these updates and checking frequently to see what you can do is the best way to ensure you move your business’s online presence forward, never backward.

With two massive updates rolling out simultaneously, it can be difficult to pinpoint the exact cause of any dips or changes in ranking trends. If your site has been hit, auditing it for helpful, reliable, and accurate content that is easy to find is always a great start.