After releasing the March core update, the August and September Helpful Content updates, Google made another big move by announcing the Google Core October Update, just two months after the previous update.
It’s important to highlight that this update is being rolled out concurrently with the October 2023 Spam Update, which was released a day earlier on October 4, 2023.
With two major updates happening simultaneously, it’s quite a challenge. In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at the update and the changes that could impact your online presence.
Table Of Contents
- What’s New in the October Google Core Update?
- What will be the Impact on your Website?
- What is the Google Spam Update?
- What you Need to Care About?
- Way Forward
What’s New in the October Google Core Update?
Google regularly launches a series of important updates throughout the year to enhance search quality and prevent any tricks to manipulate its algorithms. These updates can have a major influence on where your website appears in search results and how noticeable it is on search engine result pages (SERPs).
This update, much like Google’s September 2023 Helpful Content Update and Google’s August 2023 Core Update, had a significant impact on many websites that use a lot of AI-generated or updated content, resulting in noticeable fluctuations in their rankings. Many SEO experts saw a lot of changes during the rollout.
What will be the Impact on your Website?
Google’s core updates can create upheaval for all kinds of brands, businesses, and organizations in search rankings, and this turbulence can endure until the next update arrives. Some websites might enjoy heightened visibility and increased traffic, but others could see a decline. Any alterations in your rankings, whether they are positive or negative, can influence your organic traffic, conversions, and overall revenue.
For those worried about their ranking changes, it’s recommended to examine their website content for ways to enhance its quality and relevance, especially with Google’s October 2023 Spam Update running parallelly.
What is the Google Spam Update?
To reduce spam results for users worldwide, Google has introduced a fresh update: The October 2023 Spam Update, which targets spammy content across various languages, including Turkish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Hindi, Chinese, and more. It includes:
- Cloaking: When you show one thing to search engines and something else to users, all with the aim of tricking search rankings and misleading users.
- Hacked Content: It refers to the material added to a website without permission, typically due to security weaknesses, which leads to bad search results for users and can even install malicious content on their devices.
- Auto-Generated Content: It uses up resources and disrupts our capacity to provide the best service to users. It often involves content that doesn’t offer much value to users.
- Scraped Content: Certain website owners build their sites by copying content from other, often more reliable sources. However, using scraped content without adding useful features or content to your site may not benefit users. This practice could also be a violation of copyright.
What do you Need to Care About?
No Index’ for AI-Generated Pages: It’s essential to prevent AI or automation-generated content that might not comply with your website’s content policies from being indexed by search engines. By setting these pages as ‘no index,’ you can avoid potential SEO issues and ensure they don’t negatively impact your website’s ranking or credibility.
Maintaining Lead Generation: If you’ve noticed that certain keywords were effective for attracting leads to your business, even if those keywords are associated with AI-generated content, it can be a good strategy to temporarily run Google Search ads targeting these keywords. This allows you to continue attracting potential customers while you address and improve the content on your website to align with search engine policies.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Google’s September 2023 helpful content system update is all about making the internet a more helpful place for users. Our role is to adapt to these changes by creating content that genuinely serves our audience’s needs. It’s an exciting challenge, and by staying informed and putting the user first, we can thrive in this evolving digital landscape.
We hope that you find this blog helpful. To stay current in the ever-evolving digital landscape, be sure to follow our blog for regular SEO updates.
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Faq
Google announced its broad core search algorithm update for the year on 15 March 2023, referred to as the March core update, followed by subsequent updates, including the August 2023 core update, the September 2023 helpful content update, and most recently, the October core update to enhance the overall user experience by delivering more relevant, reliable, and valuable information in search results.
We recommend that mid-sized companies consider having two or three different domains to ensure uninterrupted business operations. Alternatively, for the short term, begin with Google Search Ads. Once you begin to generate organic traffic after optimizing your website, you can gradually decrease your advertising budget.
Google uses complex systems to find and show you stuff when you search. These systems go through tons of information in Google’s database to find words and phrases that are just right for what you asked.
