Google welcomes the hoa hoa Season with a spam update (the fourth one of the year)

This week, we said goodbye to summer and welcomed fall, but as if this seasonal change were not enough to mark the return to routine, Google has just treated us to a new spam update, the fourth so far this year.

On September 24 at 9:15 a.m. (PDT, UTC-7), one month after completing its previous spam update, Google rolled out this update to its ranking algorithm, which is responsible for detecting and limiting the visibility of websites whose content is low quality, copied, or based on poor SEO practices.

On this occasion, the tech giant has not provided many details about the update through its status page. It has simply announced that “the September 2026 spam update has been released, and it applies globally and across all languages. Its rollout may take up to two weeks to complete.”

The other spam updates carried out in 2026 took place in March and June.

What a spam update means and how to respond after its rollout

The main purpose of a spam update is to protect users from misleading content and ensure that only sites providing real value rank in the top positions. Some of the bad practices highlighted in Google’s spam policies include:

• Scaled content abuse: generating large volumes of pages (often automated) with little or no original value.
• Expired domain abuse: buying old domains to publish low-quality content while taking advantage of the domain’s previous authority.
• Link spam: buying, selling, or creating artificial link schemes to manipulate relevance.
• Site reputation abuse (parasite SEO): publishing third-party pages without oversight within a reputable website.
• Other bad practices: cloaking, hidden text or links, doorway pages, etc.

Given this scenario, the first recommendation during the rollout of the update is to stay calm and wait. If your strategy follows quality guidelines, the usual outcome is that you will not experience negative impacts, and you might even gain visibility if one of your competitors is penalized for engaging in bad practices.

However, if your site suffers a significant traffic drop, it will be essential to conduct a thorough audit by reviewing the spam policies to identify and correct any questionable techniques. It is also important to understand that recovery from this type of penalty is never immediate.

As Google points out, it takes months for its algorithm to trust a website again: “Sites that violate our policies may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all. Making changes can help a site improve its ranking if our automated systems observe over a period of several months that the site complies with our spam policies.”

Image: generated with ChatGPT Images 2.5