In October 2022, Google released an update about spam due to which a lot of websites faced a decline in traffic instantly. This is a serious issue so let’s talk about this update in detail without wasting time on other things. In this update, Google has targeted those websites which are not following Google’s spam policy.
Might be possible, you have written good-quality content but your web traffic went down. There are chances that your website is violating Google’s policy. But you don’t need to worry about that because you can recover your website by doing some simple tasks.
You should know that Google updates are complex and you have to put your effort to resolve the issues. Therefore, read these guidelines carefully, and if you face still any problems you can ask in the comment box.
There are some points that Google considers spam. You have to check these points for your website.
1. Link Spam
Link spam or backlinks is the way that people use to get backlinks for their websites in a fraudulent way. Do you know about these fraudulent links? The links that you buy or get in return for some products or gifts are considered spam links. Exchange links are also counted as spammy links.
Now the question is how Google knows about purchased links. It is very simple because Google’s algorithm is very strong. When a web owner buys links, he never does this practice one time but he buys links continuously to increase his authority.
Google has a team of experts to check these types of practices. They have powerful programs to check your links profile within a few minutes and compare the links with other websites. So, keep away from these types of practices.
Search engines count six types of links as spammy links.
1) Purchased links
2) Exchanged links
3) Links through software
4) Profile links
5) Forum links
6) Footer links or low-quality bookmarking
Now what to do if have created these types of links in past? How to get rid of these backlinks? The method is very simple and easy by which you can get rid of these low-quality backlinks. There is a Google disavow tool to remove these types of links.
How to use Disavow tool?
- Open a notepad and add all URLs of backlinks that you want to remove.
- Each line should have 1 URL
- Visit this link to select your domain
- Verify your domain by following the guidelines
- Upload this txt. File
2. Keyword Stuffing
Some people use keyword stuffing to rank in search engines with some specific keywords. For this purpose, they stuff keywords in content and try to deceive Google’s algorithm. In this way, the content becomes useless and lost his taste to the readers.
Google considers this type of content spam. The question comes to mind what to do now? There is no specific percentage of keywords to use in content. Write your content naturally and use keywords where it needs. In my opinion, 1 or 2 percent is enough.
If you remember those pages where you have stuffed keywords in content, visit those pages and revise the content to make it natural. When Google crawler will visit the website next time, the issue will be removed and you may get your ranking again.
3. Cloaking
Cloaking is another spammy way to rank your website in search engines. In this technique, websites show other content to Google bots while human users see different content. It means they are trying to deceive search engines.
When users visit the website, they see different content instead of the content that Google bots see. The purpose of this practice is to rank with specific content. Technically, this is possible but not the right way. If you have ever used this technique, you should immediately remove those pages or at least the content otherwise you will remain in spam.
Hidden Content
The use of hidden content is another way of getting spam on your website. Some SEO specialists or web developers use this technique. In this technique, they hide some content or links on a website that is normally not shown to users but search engines’ bots read that content. The purpose of this activity is to rank websites with specific keywords that are not shown to visitors.
For this purpose, they can use images, change the text color to a background color or minimize the font size of the text to zero. It is obvious that people will never like to hide content that is valuable or useful for users. They will definitely hide the poor content and the purpose is just to feed keywords to search engines.
However, if you are using this technique, you need to clean your website from such content immediately because Google considers these types of activities as spam.
5. Scraping Content
Do you know what is scrapping content? Let me tell you about this how your site gets spam when you use scraped content. Scraping content is copying content from other’s websites and publishing it on your own website without changes and doing some minor modifications. It violates the Google spam policy.
If you are copying content from other websites and using it by doing some modifications or by spinning this content using various free spin tools, get ready to be the prey of the Google algorithm. This is a spamming exercise that you are performing. Remove this type of content from your site or publish on other sites for getting backlinks.
These are some points that we highlighted to get rid of Google spam update October 2022. Further, if you think we have missed anything you can ask in the comment box. One thing that I want to say, is “work naturally always”. Don’t try shortcuts to rank your website. Sometimes you will succeed to get a ranking by using these techniques but at a point, the Google algorithm will catch you and penalize you. Have a nice time!