September 2026 Google Spam Update

Google has just announced the release of the September 2026 spam update and said it should take a couple of weeks to roll out. This is a global update and is expected to impact all languages. This only impacts sites that spam, but with any update, there may be collateral damage.

A few practical takeaways:

>>> Don’t diagnose a ranking drop from the September 24–28 period alone. The rollout is still in progress, so rankings and traffic can continue moving for another week or more.

>>> Separate spam-update effects from a potential core update. A spam update is specifically about Google’s spam-detection systems; a core update can produce much broader ranking changes. If Google launches a core update while this is rolling out, attribution will become considerably harder.

>>> Don’t assume every volatility spike is related. The timing of volatility before the announcement doesn’t establish that it came from this spam update.

>>> Audit Google’s current spam policies if you’ve experienced an unusual decline, particularly if your site uses scaled/AI-generated content, expired-domain strategies, site reputation/third-party content, deceptive redirects, cloaking, doorway pages, or other techniques that could fall under Google’s spam policies.

>>> Avoid making large reactive SEO changes during the rollout. First establish whether the decline is actually correlated with the update and whether the affected queries/pages share a pattern. Watch for the completion announcement. That’s the point at which you’ll have a much cleaner before/after comparison.

Google’s spam update documentation says:

“While Google’s automated systems to detect search spam are constantly operating, we occasionally make notable improvements to how they work. When we do, we refer to this as a spam update and share when they happen on our list of Google Search ranking updates.
For example, SpamBrain is our AI-based spam-prevention system. From time-to-time, we improve that system to make it better at spotting spam and to help ensure it catches new types of spam.

Sites that see a change after a spam update should review our spam policies to ensure they are complying with those. Sites that violate our policies may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all. Making changes may help a site improve if our automated systems learn over a period of months that the site complies with our spam policies.

In the case of a link spam update (an update that specifically deals with link spam), making changes might not generate an improvement. This is because when our systems remove the effects spammy links may have, any ranking benefit the links may have previously generated for your site is lost. Any potential ranking benefits generated by those links cannot be regained.

This is a substantial development for SEO, particularly because Google says the September 2026 spam update may take up to two weeks, rather than the roughly two days seen with several earlier 2026 spam updates.”