Google completed its August Spam Update

Google has completed the rollout of its August spam update. In just three days, and with hardly any notice, the company has officially wrapped up the adjustments aimed at identifying and reducing the visibility of websites that rely on bad SEO practices.

This is the third update of this kind so far in 2026, following those rolled out in March and June.

So what happens now? In principle, you wait. If you have done everything right so far, you should not see any negative changes. In fact, you might even move up a few spots in the search results if it is your competitors who are affected by the update 😉 And if you have done things wrong and are now facing the consequences, patience. Google itself speaks of “months” for a possible recovery:

“If you see a change on your site after a spam update, review our spam policies to ensure that you are complying with them. Sites that violate our policies may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all. Making changes may help a site improve if our automated systems learn over a period of months that the site complies with our spam policies.”

The importance of spam updates for the health of the algorithm

Let us remember that Google’s spam updates are specific improvements that Google rolls out periodically to detect and penalize pages that attempt to manipulate search results. Their main goal is to ensure that the content users find is high quality and genuinely useful, while reducing the visibility of websites that do not follow its best practices.

In essence, these updates focus on identifying tactics that go against Google’s guidelines. This includes practices such as:

• Keyword stuffing: Using an excessive number of keywords in an attempt to rank content.
• Automatically generated content: Producing irrelevant content automatically.
• Manipulative links: Using unethical strategies to gain links that improve a website’s rankings.

In addition, spam updates do not focus only on known practices, but also adapt to new techniques as they emerge. This includes detecting content generated at scale by artificial intelligence without quality oversight, as well as the abuse of expired domains to manipulate search rankings.

Image: ChatGPT