Google December 2022 Link Spam Update Unleashed Using SpamBrain AI

SEO

By Chris Barnhart On Dec 15, 2022

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Google began rolling out a revised link spam update on December 14, 2022, named the December 2022 link spam update. This update is new in that it uses SpamBrain AI to “detect both sites buying links, and sites used for the purpose of passing outgoing links,” and not just “detect spam directly,” Google said.

The update will take up to two weeks to roll out and started rolling out a week after Google started the December 2022 helpful content update, which is not yet done rolling out. The previous link spam update was in July 2021, as an FYI.

December 2022 Google Link Spam Update Quick Facts

Here are the most important things that we know right now in short form:

• Name: Google December 2022 Link Spam Update

Launch Date: It began to roll out on December 14th

Rollout: It will take up to two weeks to fully roll out

Targets: It targets both sites buying links, and sites used for the purpose of passing outgoing links.

Penalty: This will “neutralize” links that it detects as being spam and thus links that are detected won’t be counted and may show a decline in rankings.

Not a manual action: This is not a manual action, so you won’t be notified in Search Console if you are hit.

SpamBrain Link Spam Detection Upgrade

So what is new here is that this is not just a spam update but how SpamBrain uses AI to detect link spam. Google wrote, like I said above, “SpamBrain is our AI-based spam-prevention system. Besides using it to detect spam directly, it can now detect both sites buying links, and sites used for the purpose of passing outgoing links.”

Google added, “As we have always emphasized, links obtained primarily for artificial manipulation of Search rankings are link spam. Our algorithms and manual actions aim to nullify these unnatural links at scale, and we will continue to improve our coverage.”

Google later clarified that this is the first time Google is using SpamBrain for link spam detection:

“it can now detect both sites buying links” fro m our post covers this. It’s possible we’ve used it in some edge / minor situations, but this is the first real implementation of it for link spam (hence why we did a post about it) https://t.co/LLngrATiLV