Google released yet another update this past November in an effort to combat spammy websites and improve search results. This update took about eight days to complete. If you are seeing drops in rankings, your website could have been hit by the update.

How is this different from Google’s July spam update? This one in particular focuses on content spam rather than link spam.

Website owners should check their rankings and organic search traffic to make sure they were not affected by this update. Google recommends always following the Quality Raters guidelines and the Google Webmasters guidelines for Search. Website owners should make sure their content:

• Is written for users, not for search engines
• Doesn’t deceive users
• Doesn’t engage in tricks to improve search engine rankings
• Is useful and unique

Google also recommends avoiding:

• Automatically generated content
• Cloaking
• Creating pages with little content
• Participating in link schemes
• Hidden text or links
• Sneaky redirects
• Scraped content

Source: Search Engine Land