The October 2023 spam update ran from 4 to 20 October 2023, taking 16 days. It is the one spam update where the language your site publishes in matters more than anything else. Google stated it improved spam detection specifically in Turkish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Hindi, Chinese and several other languages, which made it a far bigger event outside English than inside it.
Why language is the first question here
Most spam updates apply globally and uniformly. This one was announced as targeted improvement in specific languages, aimed particularly at cloaking, hacked spam, auto-generated content and scraped content in markets where detection had been weaker.
The practical consequence: an English-language site that dropped in this window was far more likely affected by the October 2023 core update, which launched the following day. A Vietnamese or Hindi site has the opposite balance of probability.
Which of the two hit you
| Signal | Points to the spam update | Points to the core update |
|---|---|---|
| Site language | Turkish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Hindi, Chinese | English |
| Scope of loss | Concentrated on pages breaching a policy | Broad across templates |
| Severity | Near-total for affected pages | Partial decline |
| Site content | Scraped, auto-generated or cloaked | Original but thin or unfocused |
What it enforced
The same published spam policies, applied better in the targeted languages: hacked content, cloaking, scraped content republished without value, auto-generated text produced primarily for search engines, and doorway pages.
If your site does none of those things, this update almost certainly did not affect you regardless of what language you publish in. A spam update does not judge general quality, which is the most common misunderstanding about them.
Recovery
Removing the violation is the whole of it, and because spam systems reassess continuously rather than on a schedule, results typically appear within two to eight weeks rather than waiting for a core update. Sites hacked and injected with spam often recover quickly once the injection is cleaned and the vulnerability closed. The path is in spam update recovery.
Non-English site that dropped in October 2023?
This update hit specific languages hardest, and the fix is different from a core update recovery. Send your Search Console access and I will tell you which one you have.
Get free recovery auditSource: Google ranking updates list
Traffic dropped around Oct 4, 2023?
Get a free preliminary diagnosis. I confirm whether this spam update is the cause before you spend on fixes.