Santa might not bring a gift for you but Google brought an update for its dearest users, which is going to affect many businesses. Google search changes all the time, making a number of changes to its search which includes changes to its ranking system, user interface and more.
When you thought Google was done with its Google Helpful Content System Update, it came up with a new update on December 14 which is named as “Google December 2022 Link Spam Update”. It took up to two weeks to roll out.
Google said, “It can now detect both sites buying links, and sites used for the purpose of passing outgoing links” and it will use its SpamBrain AI to detect link spam directly.
Know more about December 2022 Link Spam Update
- Call it – “Google December 2022 Link Spam Update”
- It started rolling out on 14th December, 2022
- It took two weeks to fully roll out
- It aims to detect both sites buying links and sites used for the purpose of passing outgoing links
- Links that are detected as spam will be neutralised which means they won’t be counted and might indicate a drop in rankings
- It will be an automatic action. Even if you are hit you won’t receive any notification in the Search Console
- This has affected all the websites globally irrespective of language
- For the first time Google is using its AI based spam detection system i.e. SpamBrain to detect link spam
How it affects your site
As per Google, rankings may change as this link spam update neutralises unnatural links. It removes any signal passed to the linking domain. This update affect search results in all languages which could have a major impact.
What matters is how you build links and how you link out to other sites, which will determine whether this update has an impact on your website.
Google has strict guidelines against acquiring links to enhance search rankings. Approval of links on other’s website should be there as per the google guidelines.
For instance, you must qualify a referral link with rel=sponsored tag when you put it in a body of text.
If you fail to tag referral links appropriately then it will result in link spam update to hit the ranking. You also have to tag links in guest posts with rel=nofollow otherwise it will also create problems for you.
Hence, if you follow Google’s guidelines on both internal and external links in an appropriate way, then December 2022 Link Spam Update will positively impact you.
So, if you notice any decline in ranking over a couple of weeks, it might be due to this link spam update. However, Google Helpful Content System Update is still rolling out, so let’s just wait for additional updates (if they have any).
Some Suggestions To Avoid/Recover From This Spam Update
Consider following practices to get ignored and secured by this Link Spam Update:
- Add only high quality and relevant links to your website
- Make sure link leads to a page on your website and it must be relevant to the page’s content
- Avoid Cloaking as it misleads the google bots and users as well
- Avoid adding number of links at a time, as google finds it a spammy nature
- Avoid using automated programs to generate links to your site
- Avoid link schemes activity which you do to artificially increase your business’s ranking on google search results.
These are the activities you should take care of. However you can look for different techniques to recover from spam link update.
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