Google announces October 2023 Core Update and faces an indexing issue

Google, as we are well aware, is a company that does not do things that are predictable especially in the world of search results and SEO because of the fact that they want to stay ahead of the game rather than let people guess what the next step is going to be so that they can easily preampt. However, even we are saying that we have just seen something that is unprecedented from Google. You must be aware that Google announced and rolled out the August 2023 Core Update in late August few months back.

Now, they have just announced the October 2023 Core Update just two months after that update. It is highly unusual that Google rolls out Core Updates to its search results in a span of two months so we were all surprised just like everyone else. However, we can also see why Google did it as there were hundreds of reports saying that after the Core Update in August and the helpful content update in September, the Google Search results are not great and spammy in nature. This could also be Google’s way of saying that they messed up over the last two updates and that are doing course correction with this core update.

On being asked about why the need for two core updates in as many months, Google’s Search Liason said that there were things that got left out of the Core Update and the HCU that will be rolled out with this update. This is definitely a hint that Google did not want to nuke all the sites that it did and will now roll them back gradually but it is unlikely that everyone will see a total recovery. However, Google also confirmed that there was an indexing bug that creeped into the system for a few hours and that it was later fixed and after that, links were being indexed normally once again. Having said that, we feel like the indexing issue and the roll out of this Core Update were connected to each other and something broke internally which caused this bug to enter the system.