Google began rolling out the September 2026 spam update on 24 September 2026 and confirmed it complete on 8 October 2026 — a rollout of 13 days, 15h. The average spam update with a recorded start and finish has taken 10.3 days, so this one was 3.4 days longer than usual.
| Type | Spam update |
|---|---|
| Affected systems | Ranking |
| Since the previous one | 37 days after the August 2026 spam update (the average gap between spam updates is 464 days) |
| Record | From Google's Search Status API, with timestamps exact to the minute. Google's incident page → |
A spam update targets violations of Google's spam policies — link schemes, scaled content abuse, site reputation abuse. Unlike a core update, there usually is something specific on an affected site to find and remove.
What to do when an update lands · How long Google updates take · Everything running on 24 Sep 2026
1 story from our archive, oldest first, from two days before the start to ten days after the finish.
Incident began at 2026-09-24 09:15 and ended at 2026-10-08 01:00 (all times are US/Pacific).The rollout was complete as of October 8, 2026. Affected products: Ranking
Dates are Google's own, in UTC. The rollout duration and every comparison on this page are calculated here from those dates — Google publishes neither. Coverage is drawn from the headlines this site archived at the time, so updates that predate the archive show none. Corrections are welcome at contact [at] seo-serps.info.
