Google's September 2026 spam update finished on October 8 and manual actions may be rising. Here is what it targets and how to check your own site now.
Google's September 2026 spam update finished rolling out on October 8, after about two weeks. According to Search Engine Roundtable, that is far longer than the last few spam updates, which each wrapped up in around two days.
At the same time, some SEOs say Google is handing out more manual actions. If you publish content at any kind of scale, now is the moment to look at your own site before a traffic drop does it for you.
What actually happened
Google's Search Status Dashboard lists the September 2026 spam update as the latest of several this year, alongside spam updates in March, June and August. The September one ran for more than 13 days, compared with roughly two days for the June and August rollouts.
Reports differ slightly on the exact start date (Search Engine Roundtable gives September 28, while the dashboard shows an earlier start), so check the dashboard against your own analytics when you line up dates. The end date, October 8, is consistent.
There is no core update listed for October yet. Any ranking movement you see now is more likely linked to spam systems than to a core change.
Why Google keeps running these updates
Comments from Google's Search Central Live event in Europe, relayed by Search Engine Roundtable from a recap by John Campbell, give some context. Google has run more spam updates because there is much more content, and the team is now using AI to catch more of it.
A high percentage of content is spam, and that is what the spam updates target.
Gary Illyes of Google also said Google filters out 40 billion spam pages a day. Roundtable notes that figure isn't new. The more useful point, per the same recap, is his warning that scaled content is becoming a bigger problem than link spam.
Are manual actions really rising?
Maybe. Treat it as a signal, not a confirmed fact. Search Engine Roundtable reports that manual action consultant Marie Haynes said on October 7 that she has had a big increase in requests for help, going from almost none to several a week. The types she sees include thin content, pure spam and scaled content.
Her observation that most affected sites are long-standing, legitimate businesses is the part worth sitting with. These are not obvious spam farms. Another SEO, Daniel Foley Carter, said some sites lose 90% or more of their traffic overnight.
Google has not commented on any increase, and Roundtable's own review of the Webmaster Help forums found a dozen recent threads, not a flood. So don't panic. Do check.
Where established businesses get caught
Based on the examples above, the risk is rarely one dramatic tactic. It is usually a pile of shortcuts that made sense at the time:
- Hundreds of near-identical location or service pages with only the town name swapped.
- Blog posts produced in bulk with AI and published with little editing or original input.
- Old guest posts and paid links pointing at your site.
- Thin pages kept alive because they once ranked.
- A hacked or compromised section nobody noticed.
Aleyda Solis, quoted in the same Roundtable piece, suggests asking one test question of any page template: does it still work if it goes from 100 pages to 10,000? If the answer is that it would read as the same page repeated, that is commodity content.
A 30-minute check you can do this week
- Open Search Console and look at Security & Manual Actions. If there is a message, read it before you do anything else.
- Compare organic clicks for the two weeks after October 8 with the two weeks before the update started. Break it down by page group, not just the whole site.
- List the pages that lost the most clicks. Look for patterns: same template, same author, same age, same topic.
- Open five of those pages as a customer would. Would you trust them? Do they say anything a competitor's page doesn't?
- Check your backlink profile for sudden spikes from sites you don't recognise.
A digital marketing audit covers this ground in more depth, and our technical SEO work picks up crawling and hacked-content issues that a quick manual check can miss.
How to read your own numbers
Site-wide totals hide the story. A blog that lost 30% of its clicks might have one folder that lost 80% and the rest flat. Group your pages by template or section in Search Console, then compare the same weekdays before and after, so a quiet weekend doesn't look like a penalty.
Also be wary of blaming the update for everything. Seasonality, a recent site migration, a tracking change or a competitor's new content can all produce the same chart. If the drop began well before the update window, the spam update is probably not your cause.
Keep a simple log of what you changed and when. If you later need to explain a recovery, or file a reconsideration request, dated notes save a lot of guessing.
What to do if you find a problem
If you have a manual action, fix the cause across the whole site, not just the example pages Google cites, then file a reconsideration request that explains what you changed. Roundtable's forum review noted that rejected requests are a recurring complaint, usually a sign the clean-up was too narrow.
If you have no manual action but traffic fell, be careful. Spam systems act algorithmically, so there is no message to read and no request to file. Improve or remove the weak pages, and give the changes time to be recrawled.
Pruning is often better than rewriting. Merge near-duplicate pages, redirect them to the strongest version, and keep only what a real customer would find useful. Fewer, better pages beat a big archive of filler, and our content marketing and SEO teams do this clean-up regularly.
Key takeaways
- The September 2026 spam update finished on October 8 after about two weeks, much longer than recent spam updates.
- Google says it is using AI to catch spam, and its team says scaled, low-effort content is the growing risk.
- Some SEOs report more manual actions, mostly for thin, spammy or scaled content, but Google hasn't confirmed a rise.
- Check Search Console for manual actions first, then compare traffic by page group.
- Prune and merge weak pages before you write anything new.
If you would like a second pair of eyes on your site after this update, we are happy to take a look. You can get a free quote and tell us what you are seeing.
John Doe
Supreb Information. Thanks
15 July 2014 View replies . 1