October 2023 spam update
Spam update focused on cloaking, hacked content, auto-generated spam and scraped content in several under-served languages.
What changed
Google announced a spam update targeting spam types including cloaking, hacked pages, auto-generated content and scraping, with a particular focus on Turkish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Hindi, Chinese and other languages where spam had been especially prevalent. It ran from 4 to 19 October 2023 and overlapped with the October 2023 core update. Google pointed publishers at its spam policies documentation.
Timing
Rollout began 4 October 2023. Google declared it complete on 19 October 2023, 15 days later. Rankings typically remain unstable for the whole rollout window, so measurements taken inside it are not a reliable read on the outcome.