Google has confirmed that the September 2026 spam update finished rolling out on Thursday 8 October. If your enquiries, bookings or sales moved in a way you could not explain over the last fortnight, this is the first place to look.
What Google has confirmed
Google said the update applies globally and to all languages. It also warned that the rollout could take up to two weeks. Google describes this as a normal spam update with nothing new in it, other than the fact that it ran again.
This is the fourth spam update Google has announced in 2026. The two before it were the June and August updates.
| Date | What happened |
| Thursday 24 September | Update released at around 5:00pm UK time |
| Friday 25 September and that weekend | First wave of ranking volatility |
| Around 30 September | A second blip |
| 4 to 7 October | The final period of volatility |
| Thursday 8 October | Rollout complete at about 9:37am UK time |
Why the length of this rollout matters
The last few spam updates took around two days to roll out. This one took almost 14.
In practice, your traffic may have moved up and down several times over those two weeks. A bad day on 25 September, followed by a recovery on 1 October and another dip on 5 October, does not tell you much on its own. Now that the update is complete, you can judge the overall result rather than reacting to each wobble.
How to check whether your site was affected
Work through these in order.
- Compare like with like. In Google Search Console, open the Performance report and compare 24 September to 8 October with the 15 days before it. Search Console data runs a couple of days behind, so allow for that.
- Look below the total. Check the Pages and Queries tabs. A fall across the whole site points to a different problem from a fall on a handful of pages.
- Rule out your own changes. Tracking changes, a redesign, a new plugin, a server outage or seasonal demand can all look like a penalty in a graph.
- Check for a manual action. Search Console has a Manual Actions report. If there is a message there, you are dealing with a separate issue that needs its own fix and a reconsideration request.
If your reporting is patchy, or you cannot tell what normal looks like for your site, that is a gap worth fixing now. Our reporting and analytics work is built around giving you a clear baseline, so a future update can be measured rather than guessed at.
What spam updates look for
Google has not said this update targeted anything new, so the standing spam policies are the reference point. They cover the following:
- Content produced in bulk with little original value
- Paid or manipulative links
- Cloaking and hidden text
- Hacked content
- Expired domains bought to borrow authority
- Third-party content published on a site purely to exploit its rankings
Google also publishes a help document on spam updates that explains how these systems work.
If your traffic dropped
Start with the pages that lost the most visits and ask the following questions about each one.
- Was it written quickly, in volume, with nothing a reader could not find elsewhere?
- Does it sit on a site with a history of bought links, low-quality directory listings or link swaps?
- Has anything appeared on your site that you did not publish, such as odd pages, injected links or hidden text? Hacked sites are a common and overlooked cause.
Fix what you find, but do not delete half your site in a panic. Recovery after a spam update is not instant, because Google needs time to reassess a site once the problems are gone.
It is also worth knowing that legitimate sites sometimes get caught up in spam updates. If you have checked honestly and found nothing wrong, you may simply be an unlucky casualty, and a methodical audit is still the right next step. This is the kind of problem our SEO services cover, including recovery from Google penalties, and you can see how we have handled similar situations in our case studies.
If your traffic held up
Four spam updates in nine months suggests this will keep happening, so a clean result now is not a reason to stop paying attention. The biggest risks for a site that has done nothing wrong are the ones you do not see:
- Spam comments or user-submitted content
- Outdated plugins that let someone inject links
- Old link-building work carried out by someone else
Regular checks catch these early. Our website maintenance and support service covers the security and housekeeping side, so small problems do not turn into ranking problems.
Need a second opinion?
If your numbers moved and you cannot work out why, get in touch. We will look at your Search Console data against the update dates and tell you plainly whether the cause is the update, your own site, or something else.
Graig Upton
Graig Upton is a UK SEO and Google Ads consultant with 23 years of hands-on digital marketing experience. Google certified in Ads, Analytics and Conversions, he has helped businesses ranging from local providers to national brands - including Nando's and Financial Times - dominate search and scale their leads. Based in Preston, working with clients across the UK.