2026 so far. Every ranking update Google confirmed during the year, the stories the most outlets ran, and the news most likely to have mattered to a working site — built from our own archive of 1,106 stories.
7 named updates, rolling out for 65 days in total.
| Update | Type | Started | Rollout |
|---|---|---|---|
| February 2026 Discover update | Discover update | 5 Feb 2026 | 21 days, 17h |
| March 2026 spam update | Spam update | 24 Mar 2026 | 19h 30m |
| March 2026 core update | Core update | 27 Mar 2026 | 12 days, 4h |
| May 2026 core update | Core update | 21 May 2026 | 11 days, 21h |
| June 2026 spam update | Spam update | 24 Jun 2026 | 2 days, 1h |
| August 2026 spam update | Spam update | 18 Aug 2026 | 2 days, 16h |
| September 2026 spam update | Spam update | 24 Sep 2026 | 13 days, 15h |
Ranked by estimated impact on a single site, not by publication time.
Searchers outside of the European Economic Area (EEA), the manual action will apply but not within the EEA.
Policy & Penalties
In 2024, we introduced our site reputation policy to stop a practice where third-party content is published on a trusted website just to exploit that site's good reputation to rank higher in Search.…
Policy & Penalties
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
Ranking & Algorithms
The update took 2.5 days to roll out and is now complete.
Ranking & Algorithms
Google is replacing site reputation abuse manual actions in the EEA with a system that can rank affected site sections independently.
Ranking & Algorithms Policy & Penalties
Google's spam update caused exceptional search disruption, with dramatic ranking losses across 20 industries, according to SE Ranking data.
Ranking & Algorithms
This spam update took two full days to roll out.
Ranking & Algorithms
The May 2026 Core Update was announced on 21st May 2026, following the March Core Update. It was completed on the 2nd June. Data, analysis, examples and rankings for affected domains are shown below…
Ranking & Algorithms
This is the second Google core update of 2026, following the March 2026 core update.
Ranking & Algorithms
I know I just reported on an unconfirmed Google Search ranking update from this past Saturday, October 24th. But I am now seeing a larger spike in volatility, along with an increase in SEO community…
Ranking & Algorithms
This past Saturday, October 24th, we saw some significant ranking volatility captured by many of the third-party Google tracking tools. There was also some heavy chatter within the SEO industry about…
Ranking & Algorithms
Google recently made substantial updates to my favorite piece of search documentation: Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content. For years, this has been my favourite Google documentation…
Content & Quality Policy & Penalties
Assembled from our own archive of 1,106 stories, which currently runs from 4 October 2023. Ranking is by the impact score described on the front page — an estimate of how much a story is likely to affect one website, not a measure of how much attention it got.
The archive only holds what it has seen. Periods before it started are empty rather than quiet, and it gets more complete every week it runs.
