Google logged a ranking incident beginning 5 October 2023 and lasting 26 days. It is recorded on the Search Status Dashboard as a fault rather than a named update, and it overlapped both the October 2023 core update and the October 2023 spam update. Three separate entries covering almost the same window.
This is the entry almost nobody includes in an update list, because it is not an update. It is Google reporting that ranking was not working correctly.
Why it matters for diagnosis
October 2023 already had two confirmed updates running nearly simultaneously. Adding a 26 day fault on top means any drop in that month has three possible explanations before you even consider your own site.
- October 2023 spam update ran 4 to 20 October, targeting detection in specific languages.
- October 2023 core update ran 5 to 19 October, a broad quality reassessment.
- This ranking incident ran from 5 October for 26 days, a fault rather than an intentional change.
What a ranking incident actually is
Google created the Search Status Dashboard in December 2022 to report widespread problems in crawling, indexing and serving. Ranking incidents are logged there alongside updates, but they are a different kind of event.
An update is intentional. An incident is something going wrong. Google considers it resolved when engineers have ended the impact, though sites may feel effects for longer while pages are reprocessed.
If you dropped in October 2023
Treat the whole month as one contaminated window. The last clean baseline before this sequence is August 2023, before the September helpful content update. Search Console retains sixteen months, so that data is long gone unless you exported it.
The wider sequence is covered in the October 2023 core update and the August 2023 core update.
Lost traffic in autumn 2023 and never pinned it down?
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