October 2023 core update

The month after the helpful content update

The September 2023 helpful content update completed on 28 September. Seven days later this core update began. Publishers who had lost half their traffic in September had no realistic chance to diagnose, fix and be recrawled before a second reassessment arrived.

Some saw further decline. A smaller number saw partial return, which created a confusing signal: the same site could be down 60 percent from September and up 15 percent from October, and the owner had no way to read that as anything but noise.

Overlapping with a spam update

The October 2023 spam update ran 4 to 20 October, covering almost the identical window. Google stated that spam update targeted spam in multiple languages including Turkish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Hindi and Chinese, which made it more consequential for non-English sites than the core update running alongside it.

• English-language sites: a drop in this window is far more likely to be the core update.
• Non-English sites, particularly in the named languages: the spam update deserves equal consideration.
• Either way, check September first. Many drops dated to October were actually September losses that had not fully settled.

Establishing a clean baseline for this period

There is not one, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions. The last uncontaminated window before this sequence is August 2023, before the September helpful content update. Comparing September, October and November against each other measures one disruption against another. The drop analyzer will find each break point in your own data so you can see how many there actually were.

Source: Google ranking updates list