Did the Google October 2023 spam update impact your businesses SEO?
Author: Ryan Walsh
Written on: 11/ October/2023
Introduction
If you were to talk to most digital marketing consultants, they will tell you that Google seems to be rolling out large updates to its algorithm on a very regular basis.
Ever since the Google Panda update, that was way back in 2011, we would say that Google has most definitely picked up the pace in terms of rolling out new algorithm updates.
We are not talking about the spam that you can eat, that’s made of pork! What we are talking about here is an update to Google algorithms, to help detect low-quality content marketing such as duplicated content marketing.
For example, the spam could include:
Auto generated content (we think this might include A.I content as well)
It’s a bit too early to tell if A.I content will negatively affect businesses organic search engine optimisation or not. However, from experience, what we would say is if you’re just pushing a button, and it’s writing 1000 words for you, well it seems a bit too easy to generate content marketing and we don’t think it’s going to show same level of expertise that an expert on the subject could write.
So, if you were to ask us for our recommendation, we would say do not to use AI content to and instead still manually write this work.
Duplicated content marketing
There are still some people who think that they can copy and paste other businesses work, not only does this infringe on copyright laws, but also it can massively damage your businesses search engine optimisation as well.
Any business should therefore need to avoid copying any other companies work, and instead come up with original written work which shows your businesses perspective on what you are writing about.
To copy another businesses content marketing, means that your business is likely to move down Google’s ranks.
So, what exactly does Google algorithms consider to be spam?
Cloaking
So, this is most definitely not a method of seo that we recommend using, that’s using “cloaking”.
Yet with that said, some companies have and still try to use this method, that write a load of text, which is mostly full of keywords that they want to rank for (this method of seo doesn’t work).
And then often these are put in the footer of the page, and the text is then made the same colour as the background, therefore making the writing invisible.
Again, we don’t recommend using this method, it’s considered spam and it’s likely to get your business penalised by a Google Panda Penalty.
Spun content or AI Generated Content Marketing
So “spun content marketing” this is a topic that hasn’t been talked about for some time by a lot of digital marketing agencies, because you don’t see many companies using this method now.
And that’s with good reason, as using spun content marketing can result in the business incurring a Google Penalty.
So, we don’t recommend using this method of seo at all.
What basically happens is you feed a program with an article, and then it starts to make hundreds of blog posts out of that one article.
The content marketing that’s produced is very low-quality and will result in the business incurring an algorithmic penalty.
We would also recommend not using AI content on your website, because quite simply put, we don’t think that this is going to enhance a business’s search engine optimisation.
What is far better is to have somebody within your company, that has a huge amount of expertise on the products / services that you sell, and they sit down and work marketing company to create very high quality, unique, well written content marketing that helps your customers find the right item or service they need.
Constant battle
To write say a good, well-written thousand-word article, that’s well researched, well this might take you say best part of the day to write?
That’s because you’re going to have to research the article, gain different people’s perspectives and include these within the article,
Then the work has to be proofread often multiple times, you have to gain some backlinks to cite your sources, so this takes a large amount of time.
And because this involves so much work, well, you’re are always going to have businesses which try cut corners, its these are the ones which often incur a penalty.
A Google Penalty can then mean that the business moves down Google and sometimes it can take many years to recover from a penalty.