Earlier this month, we reported that more and more searchers and webmasters are spotting hacked content in Google. The truth is, the chatter around spammy or hacked content has recently grown in the past couple weeks. Some suspect, and I was one of them, that potentially it has to do with the two core updates this weekend and the weekend before or any other update like the Payday loan update but John Mueller from Google said it's not.
John said on Twitter that "no, that sounds more coincidental" than related to any core updates.
The question and answer are embedded here:
@ramirez_robert @methode No, that sounds more coincidental.
— John Mueller (@JohnMu) January 20, 2016Gary Illyes also backed what John Mueller was saying later on on Twitter.
So no, there was no Payday Loan update and it sounds like John is saying that if you are seeing more hacked or spammy content, it is unrelated to any update Google has done, including core updates.
Maybe spammers are getting busy...
Forum discussion at Twitter.
