Category: Google Ads, SEO Management
On 24 September, Google started rolling out its September 2026 spam update. It applies to all languages and all countries, and Google says it may take up to two weeks to finish.
If you’ve seen headlines about it, or noticed your rankings move a little this week, you might be wondering whether your business website is at risk. For the vast majority of local businesses in Salisbury and the surrounding area, the answer is no. But it’s worth understanding what a spam update is, because the same questions come up every time one happens.
What a spam update is
Google has automated systems that look for websites trying to trick their way up the search results. A spam update is when Google makes a notable improvement to those systems. Sites that break Google’s spam policies may drop down the rankings, or disappear from the results altogether.
This is the fourth spam update Google has confirmed this year, following others in March, June and August. Those three finished within a few days. This one has been given a longer window of up to two weeks. Google hasn’t said exactly what it’s targeting this time, and it’s described it as a normal spam update rather than one aimed at a particular tactic.
How it differs from a core update
You may also hear about core updates. They’re different.
A core update is a broad change to how Google ranks websites in general. It’s not about catching rule-breakers. It’s about Google getting better at deciding which pages are most helpful for a search. A perfectly honest website can move up or down in a core update, simply because Google has reassessed it against its competitors.
A spam update is narrower. It’s about catching websites that break specific rules. If your website plays by the rules, a spam update shouldn’t have any direct effect on it.
What actually puts a website at risk
Google publishes its spam policies, and they cover the kinds of things most local businesses would never dream of doing. Hiding text on a page for search engines but not people. Showing Google one version of a page and visitors another. Filling pages with keywords until they barely make sense. Creating large numbers of low-quality pages purely to rank, whether written by hand or generated by AI. Copying content from other websites.
The one that most often catches out small businesses is links. If someone has ever sold you hundreds of backlinks for a small fee, or you’ve paid for articles on websites that will publish anything for money, those links break Google’s rules. Most of the time, Google simply ignores links like these. But if your website relies heavily on them, a spam update can be when that catches up with you.
The other area worth thinking about is location pages. A website with dozens of near-identical pages for every town and village within thirty miles, each with the same text and a different place name, is the sort of thing Google’s policies describe as doorway pages.
What about content written with AI?
Plenty of business owners now use AI tools to help write their website content, and some are worried that this alone will get them caught by a spam update. It won’t. Google’s concern is with content created at scale mainly to manipulate rankings, with little value for the reader, not with how it was written.
A page that’s been drafted with help from AI, then checked, corrected and improved by someone who knows the business, is no different in Google’s eyes to one written from scratch. A website that has published hundreds of thin, near-identical AI pages in the hope of ranking for every possible search is a different matter. As we said when we wrote about using ChatGPT for your marketing, it’s a useful tool as long as you don’t depend on it.
My rankings have dropped. Was it the update?
Not necessarily. Rankings move up and down all the time, for all sorts of reasons. A competitor may have improved their website. Google may be testing something. Your own website may have had a technical problem. A dip over a few days, especially while an update is still rolling out, doesn’t prove anything.
The best thing to do is wait until the rollout has finished, then look at the data. Google Search Console will show you whether your clicks and impressions have genuinely changed, and from what date. If the drop lines up with the update and doesn’t recover, it’s worth looking more closely.
What to do if you think you’ve been affected
If your traffic has clearly fallen since the update, start by reviewing your website against Google’s spam policies honestly. Look at any links you’ve paid for, any pages created mainly to rank rather than to help people, and any content copied from elsewhere.
Fixing problems is the right thing to do, but don’t expect an instant recovery. Google’s own guidance says improvements can take months to be recognised, as its systems learn that a site is now playing by the rules. And if the issue was links, removing or ignoring them may not bring back rankings those links were artificially propping up.
If you’re not sure what’s caused a drop, get someone to look properly before you start changing things. Making lots of changes in a panic can make it harder to work out what’s going on.
What to do if you haven’t been affected
Carry on. The best protection against spam updates is the same as the best route to good rankings in general: a genuinely useful website, written for real customers, with honest links from real local websites. If that describes your business, spam updates are more likely to help you than harm you, because they remove some of the competitors who were cheating.
If you’d like someone to check how your website is doing after the update, the friendly, experienced team at Spire Digital help businesses in Salisbury and the surrounding area with search engine optimisation (SEO). Give us a call on 01722 320 500.