Now that both the Google October 2023 core update is done rolling out and the October 2023 spam update is done rolling out, we wanted to take a deeper dive on how this core update differed from previous Google core updates.
Keep in mind, these updates rolled out at the same time, so the analysis is probably skewed because of that. Of course, Google said spam sites were impacted by the spam update and if you were not spamming and you saw traffic drops, that is probably related to the core update.
Here is the timeline for those two updates:
- The Spam update started on October 4, 2023, and ended on October 10, 2023
- The Core update started on October 5, 2023, and ended on October 20, 2023
There overall was a lot of ranking volatility across many verticals in the Google search results over this time frame, like most Google updates.
Data providers on the Google updates
Semrush. Semrush data showed that we saw some peak volatility of 7.9 in terms of their Semrush Sensor data volatility. The peak occurred on October 10th, as the chart shows. But as you can see, when comparing this to the Google August 2023 core update, there were calm periods with high volatility but with the August core update, it was just all high volatility.
“To that, peak levels of volatility were lower than in August. However, it’s important to remember that the entire environment was volatile in August and it’s unclear how that affected peak volatility levels exactly,” Mordy Oberstein from the Semrush team told us.
Here is a chart showing the peak volatility by niche or industry, comparing the October 2023 to the August 2023 core updates:
However, when you look at the increases in volatility relative to the baseline, the October 2023 core update was less impactful overall.