Google September 2026 spam update

The Google September 2026 spam update started on 24 September 2026. On Google’s ranking list it is still marked as information, which means they have not posted a finish time.

If a client’s traffic twitched this week, look up this name before you invent a story. It is not the March or May core update. Those already ended. The August spam update on the same list took 2 days and 16 hours. This September one does not have an end date yet.

A cleanup, not a rewrite of every site

Google’s note on spam updates is plain. These rollouts improve the systems that catch spam. A site that breaks the spam rules can rank lower, or disappear. A site that does not spam is not the target. Some innocent pages still move. Google does not publish a percentage for that, so neither should a recap.

The check is the spam policies, not a screenshot from a forum. Thin doorway pages, scraped articles, and bought links are the pile this kind of update is built for. “We published three blog posts last month” is not that pile.

Bought links do not come back

If the drop was link spam, taking the links down on Friday does not hand the old rankings back. Google says the benefit those links were giving is removed, and it cannot be regained. That is the sentence to send a client who wants a disavow file and a recovery by Monday.

Do not mix this up with a different chart. Clicks can fall while the average position stays put, because more of the results page is an AI answer sitting above the links. That is a layout change, not this rollout. The note for that is how brand positioning shows up in AI answers.

What to do while it is still rolling out

Open Search Console and compare the days after 24 September with the week before. If impressions and position are steady, leave it alone. If a whole section fell, and that section was never a real page, look there first. Tag archives, doorway URLs, and guest posts you did not write are the usual cases.

Do not publish a pile of new URLs “to recover.” A spam update is a bad week to look busier. The date and the label come from Google’s ranking status list. When that row gains a duration, the rollout is over. Until then, do not call it finished.