A slew of updates for Google occurred in Q3 and the during the start of Q4. Google saw recent completion of its October 2023 core update. This happened concurrently with the October 2023 spam update and only weeks after Google finished rolling out the August 2023 and September 2023 core updates.
October’s update saw several bugs occur, including a massive indexing issue that saw search go without update for a few days in October. This happened because of Google attempting to drop some pages from search entirely, trying to eliminate spam pages rather than simply reducing their rankings. This was unlikely to effect legitimate pages but if one did go from going unindexed for a couple days to its complete removal from Google’s ecosystem, it would be less than ideal to a business.
Google’s spam update intended to increase its reach in previously underserviced languages. This included Turkish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Hindi, Chinese, and others. Businesses operating in those languages in particular ought to review their page health, as they were the ones to see the most ranking volatility during these October updates.
Whenever Google updates its search ranking algorithms, it means that your site can do better or worse in the search results. Knowing when Google makes these updates gives us something to point to in order to understand if it was something you changed on your website or something Google changed with its ranking algorithm. The best response to these updates is the same thing you should do whether there is an algorithm update or not, follow SEO best practices so as to maintain an organic ranking that is less prone to algorithm volatility.