Google Spam Updates Explained

If you keep an eye on your website’s Google rankings, you could be forgiven for thinking that Google has spent much of the past year moving the goal posts, and in fairness, it pretty much has. Alongside its other changes to Search, Google has rolled out a succession of spam updates. We had one in August 2025, followed by further updates in March, June and August 2026, and now another in September 2026. During these periods, you may have noticed some volatile changes in your website traffic or rankings.

Understandably, the words spam update can sound rather ominous, particularly when you’re a perfectly legitimate small business that has never knowingly done anything remotely spammy. Then, suddenly, a graph in Google Search Console appears to be heading in the wrong direction.

The natural question is: does Google suddenly think my website is spam?

The good news is, probably not.

So, before you start rewriting pages, changing titles or deleting half your website in an attempt to fix it. Let’s spend some time understanding what these updates actually are and why they can affect perfectly legitimate businesses too.

What is a Google spam update?

Google has systems running all the time that are designed to identify websites and practices that violate its spam policies for Google Search. So, when Google makes a significant improvement to those systems, it may release what it calls a spam update. You can actually see these updates, alongside Google’s core updates and other ranking incidents, on the Google Search Status Dashboard.

What is interesting is how frequently they have appeared recently. For example, the August 2025 spam update took almost four weeks to complete. Since then we’ve had further spam updates in March, June and August 2026. Shortly followed by the current September update that began on 24 September and was still rolling out while I wrote this article.

What is spam?

So, if your search visibility has felt a little more lively than usual, there has certainly been plenty happening in the background. But the word spam needs some context. Google isn’t simply looking for websites it doesn’t particularly like. Its policies are aimed at practices designed to deceive users or manipulate search rankings.

However, that doesn’t mean only deliberately dishonest businesses need to think about them. Perfectly legitimate small businesses can stumble into this territory surprisingly easily, often because they’ve been told that a particular technique is simply “an SEO trick”.

A business may have no intention of deceiving Google, they just want to be found in an increasingly crowded marketplace. In fact, I often find they are simply following advice from an AI agent, SEO company, a developer, or something they’ve seen on social media. Truly believing they have unearthed a secret formula of helping their page rank.

When SEO becomes spam without looking like spam

This is where I think things become more interesting. Most small business owners aren’t sitting at their desks plotting ways to manipulate Google’s algorithm. They’re running their businesses, looking after customers, doing the accounts. And, occasionally wondering if those spam emails or submitted contact forms offering to get them to number one on Google are actually worth a punt!

What they do sometimes legitimately have is the legacy of SEO advice they were given several years ago. Perhaps somebody created a separate page for every town within a 30-mile radius because they were told they needed a page to rank in each location. The result might be 40 pages saying essentially the same thing with little more than the place name changed.

Maybe an SEO company built hundreds of backlinks because, at the time, more links were considered better. Or perhaps the business has been encouraged to publish article after article because somebody said Google likes “fresh content”, regardless of whether those articles add anything useful or are optimised correctly.

This doesn’t mean the business owner set out to spam Google. In many cases, they simply followed the SEO advice they were paying an ‘expert’ to give. Unfortunately, Google can only assess what exists. It doesn’t know that Dave from an SEO company in 2019 promised those 75 location pages were an excellent idea.

Old SEO advice can cause new problems

This is one of the reasons I think older small business websites sometimes need to be approached with a little care. Before adding more optimised content, it can be much more useful to understand what is already there and why.

It is also why I am wary of changing something simply because AI or an SEO tool has identified an opportunity. As I explained in Why Your Website Isn’t Getting Enquiries, more traffic isn’t particularly useful if it isn’t bringing the right people to your business.

Is AI content considered spam?

Unsurprisingly, AI has complicated this conversation. I’ve seen plenty of claims suggesting that Google can identify AI-written content and that using ChatGPT or another AI tool to help create website content will result in some sort of automatic penalty. That isn’t what Google’s published guidance says.

Google’s spam policies include something called scaled content abuse. This is essentially content produced at scale primarily to manipulate search rankings rather than to help users. Google specifically includes using generative AI to create lots of pages without adding value as one possible example. There is quite a difference between that and saying, “AI content is spam”.

Does using AI make content spam?

I use AI occasionally myself. The important question isn’t whether AI was involved somewhere in the process. It’s what you eventually optimise and publish that matters.

If a business generates hundreds of generic articles covering every keyword an SEO tool can find, adds nothing original and publishes them largely because it wants more pages appearing in Google, that’s a very different proposition from using AI to support research, organise ideas or help develop content that contains genuine business knowledge and experience.

I’ve written before about whether you should let AI update your website, and the same principle applies here. AI can be enormously useful, but handing over responsibility for your website without understanding what it is producing isn’t a particularly good strategy.

For me, a much better question than “Did AI write this?” is:

Does this page actually deserve to exist?

If it answers a genuine question, helps the person reading it, contains real knowledge or experience and serves a clear purpose on the website, that’s very different from publishing another 500 words simply because somebody found a keyword.

Why would a legitimate website be affected?

This is the bit that can be confusing.

If Google’s update is targeting spam and your website isn’t spammy, why might your rankings move at all? The answer is because search results don’t exist in isolation.

Imagine you have ten businesses competing for visibility for a particular search. Google changes the way it assesses one type of signal and several of those websites are reassessed. If one result moves down, something else has to occupy the space it previously held.

That means legitimate websites can move up during a spam update too.

It also means that movement doesn’t automatically tell us why it happened. Your website might have changed position because Google reassessed your page, because it reassessed somebody else’s page, because the mix of results changed, or because several things happened at once.

And sometimes what initially looks like a problem isn’t really the problem you thought it was.

A real example from my own website

I had exactly this situation recently with my own website. I noticed an apparent change in the search performance of one of my pages while Google was rolling out an update. If I was a small business owner who did not understand the figures, it would have been very easy to look at the headline numbers and start “optimising” the page. However, I am me and so took a deep dive into what was actually happening, once the full research was completed and the fuller picture revealed, there was not enough evidence to change anything. So I didn’t!

I’m deliberately not going to turn this into a technical explanation of exactly what I checked because that’s the work I do for my clients. But the principle is useful whether you’re an SEO professional or a small business owner:

A change in your data is a reason to investigate. It isn’t automatically a reason to change your website, and that distinction matters.

Sometimes the best SEO change is no change

There is an understandable tendency in website optimisation to feel that we should always be doing something. Traffic has fallen? Rewrite the page. Rankings have moved? Change the title. Competitor has overtaken us? Add another 800 words. Google has announced an update? Quick, optimise everything!

That can sometimes do considerably more harm than good.

If a page has performed strongly for a long time, I want a good reason before I substantially change it. I want to understand what has actually moved, whether it matters to the business and whether there is evidence that the page itself is the problem.

This became particularly apparent when I looked at the digital marketing changes affecting small businesses in 2026. Search is changing in several directions at once. Traditional results, AI-generated search experiences and changing user behaviour all influence what we eventually see in our reports. Looking at one number and assuming we know what caused it is becoming increasingly unreliable.

Could your website actually benefit from a spam update?

Absolutely.

This tends to get forgotten because nobody writes a panicked LinkedIn post announcing that their rankings stayed exactly the same! If competing websites have been benefiting from tactics Google is becoming better at identifying, removing or discounting that advantage can create opportunities for small businesses that have taken a more sustainable approach.

That doesn’t mean every well-written small business website will suddenly leap to the top of Google whenever a spam update happens. There are far too many factors involved for that. However, if Google becomes better at identifying content that exists primarily to manipulate search, I would much rather own a website built around useful information, genuine expertise and real services than one dependent on finding the next loophole.

It’s one of the reasons my approach to ethical SEO services for small businesses has never been about chasing every possible keyword or manufacturing pages simply to increase the amount of content on a website. The aim isn’t more Google.

It’s more of the right people finding your business through Google and those aren’t always the same thing.

What should you do after a Google spam update?

If your traffic or rankings have changed during an update, don’t assume the worst. Give the data some context first and ask yourself these questions:

• Has your actual business performance changed? Are you receiving fewer relevant enquiries, or has a large number on a graph simply become a slightly smaller large number?

• Did your whole website change, or just one particular page?

• What visibility changes have happened for searches that actually matter to your business?

• And, perhaps most importantly, is there anything on the website that genuinely concerns you when you compare it with Google’s spam policies?

If there is evidence of a real problem, then it should be investigated and corrected. That could mean dealing with old manipulative SEO, improving or consolidating low-value content, removing hacked material, or reconsidering pages that were created primarily for search engines rather than people.

What I wouldn’t recommend is allowing anyone (include AI) making sweeping changes simply because the dates happen to coincide with a Google update. Timing is a clue. It isn’t proof.

What can small businesses learn from all this?

For me, the lesson from the past year of spam updates isn’t that small businesses need to become frightened of Google. It’s almost the opposite. The more Google tries to identify manipulation, the less attractive short-term SEO tricks become.

You don’t need a blog article for every conceivable search phrase, you do need content that will help your customers. Additionally, 50 near-identical location pages is simply not necessary in order to rank locally. Also, save your money, you don’t need to buy hundreds of backlinks. And you certainly don’t need to publish enormous quantities of generic AI-generated content just because producing it has suddenly become incredibly easy.

You need a website that makes sense.

It should clearly explain who you are, what you do and who you help. Make sure you include genuinely useful information and always demonstrate real knowledge and experience rather than simply repeating what already exists elsewhere online.

Often this is overlooked, but your website should also be technically sound, easy for search engines to understand and, increasingly, structured clearly enough for newer forms of AI search to understand your website too.

None of that is particularly exciting compared with discovering a secret SEO trick.

But that’s rather the point!

Google will keep changing

There will always be more Google updates, and as humans using the internet we should welcome that. Additionally, as a small business owner, there will almost certainly be more frightening graphs, more dramatic posts declaring that SEO has changed forever and more people announcing that they have discovered the solution approximately 20 minutes after an update starts rolling out.

I’d be very cautious about all three.

Google’s systems will continue changing, and websites will continue moving around as a result. The sensible response isn’t to try to react to every movement.

Build something worth finding. Keep an eye on what is actually happening. Investigate properly when something changes and make improvements when there is evidence that an improvement is needed.

And if there isn’t?

Sometimes the best thing you can do for your SEO is leave it alone.