In October 2022, Google rolled out a broad spam update that targeted websites using manipulative tactics to inflate their search rankings. While spam updates had been released periodically before, this one was notable for its scope and for the clarity of the message it sent: the tactics that had propped up low-quality websites for years were becoming increasingly ineffective.
What Google means by spam
In the context of search, spam doesn’t just mean unsolicited emails. Google defines spam as any practice designed to manipulate its search results in ways that violate its guidelines. This covers a wide range of behaviours, from automatically generated content with no real value, to cloaking, where a website shows different content to Google than it shows to users, to the kinds of link schemes that Penguin had already begun targeting a decade earlier.
The 2022 spam update refined and improved Google’s ability to detect these practices algorithmically. Websites relying on any of these tactics were at risk of significant ranking drops, and some were removed from search results entirely.
The role of SpamBrain
A significant part of Google’s modern spam-fighting capability comes from a system called SpamBrain, an AI-based platform that Google has been developing and improving over a number of years. SpamBrain is trained to identify patterns associated with manipulative behaviour, and it gets better at doing so as it processes more data.
The 2022 update represented one of the more substantial improvements to SpamBrain’s capabilities. Google indicated that it was now significantly better at identifying both sites that spammed directly and sites that were being used as vehicles to pass spammy links to other sites. Both ends of link manipulation schemes were in scope.
Why this matters beyond obvious rule-breakers
It might be tempting to assume that a spam update is only relevant to websites that are knowingly breaking the rules. In practice, the picture is sometimes more complicated. Businesses that had worked with SEO providers in the past, without full visibility into what tactics were being used, sometimes found that their websites had accumulated problematic signals without the business owner ever being aware of it.
If your site has legacy SEO work in its history that you don’t fully understand, a spam update is a prompt to look more closely at what was done and whether any of it presents a risk.
What this means for your business
The most important takeaway from Google’s ongoing spam-fighting efforts is that shortcuts in SEO have a limited shelf life. Tactics that produce short-term gains through manipulation are increasingly likely to be identified and penalised as Google’s detection capabilities improve.
Building search visibility through genuine content, legitimate link earning, and sound technical foundations takes longer. It also lasts longer, and it doesn’t carry the risk of being wiped out by the next spam update. For Lancashire SMEs investing in their digital presence, that is the only approach worth taking seriously.
