Google has confirmed that the December 2022 link spam update is now finished rolling out. The update took 15 days and 12 hours to roll out, starting on October 4, 2023, and ending on October 10, 2023. Google has posted it was completed today, October 10.

What was this spam update. Google said the October 2023 spam update “aims to clean up several types of spam that our community members reported in Turkish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Hindi, Chinese, and other languages.”

Google added that update should “reduce the visible spam in search results, particularly when it comes to cloaking, hacked, auto-generated, and scraped spam.”

Google later added on X, “We’ve done work to especially improve coverage in some languages, as our blog post explained. So yes, those language likely will see bigger and more helpful change. But the improvements are not limited to those languages.”

Impact. It will be hard to figure out the exact impact of this update, since Google decided to release the October 2023 core update at the same time and complete it just several hours ago. But I do believe we saw a nice number of spam sites get targeted in a big way around October 9, 2023.

Previous updates. Before this, the most recent confirmed Google spam update was the October 2022 spam update and the  December 2022 link spam update. Before that was the  November 2021 spam update. Google also released a two-part Spam Update – on June 23 and June 28 in 2021, as well as the July 2021 link spam update.

Why we care. If you notice changes to your rankings over the next few weeks and your site is not primarily English, although, it may target English results, it may be related to this. This update specifically targets cloaking, hacked, auto-generated, and scraped spam.