Knowledge base v2.13.0 · Community edition · data through 2 October 2026
Thing · Update
Updates to Google's spam-detection systems, announced on the Search Status Dashboard.
Glossary · Spam update
A notable improvement to Google's automated spam detection systems, such as SpamBrain, listed with its ranking updates. Spam updates target spam pages; to recover, a site removes the spam Google described.
Documented in
Google's October 2023 spam update post (4 October 2023) says the update improved coverage in many languages and spam types, cleaning up spam reported in Turkish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Hindi, Chinese and other languages, particularly cloaking, hacked, auto-generated and scraped spam.
Search Central blog (4 October 2023) · Day 2 · Lightning session G: Internationalisation
Google's Search Status Dashboard says the September 2026 spam update began on 24 September 2026, applies globally to all languages and may take up to two weeks to roll out.
Google Search Status Dashboard (Ranking incident history), Google Search Status Dashboard (September 2026 spam update) · Day 3 · How Google thinks about Quality
As of 3 October 2026, the Ranking history of Google's Search Status Dashboard lists two core updates in 2026 (March and May) and four spam updates (March, June, August and September).
Google Search Status Dashboard (Ranking incident history) · Day 3 · What are quality updates
Google's spam updates page says its automated spam detection systems run constantly, and a notable improvement to them, such as to the AI-based SpamBrain system, is called a spam update and listed with Google's ranking updates.
Google Search Central · Day 3 · What are quality updates
Google's spam updates page says that after a spam update, changes may help a site improve if Google's automated systems learn over a period of months that the site complies with its spam policies.
Google Search Central · Day 3 · What are quality updates
Google's spam updates page says that after a link spam update, fixing the site might not bring an improvement, because any ranking benefit the spammy links had generated is lost and cannot be regained.
Google Search Central · Day 3 · What are quality updates
Slide and stage claims that name it, the ones Google’s documentation does not cover first.
Google's quality talk said its spam updates mostly target spam pages, so most site owners in the audience were probably not affected.
Google's quality talk said AI has fundamentally changed how Google builds spam updates, letting it evaluate many more candidates and drastically increasing its velocity, so it launches faster with more impact.
Every kind of Search update, whether a feature launch, a core update or a spam update, has the same goal: satisfying users' information needs with better results.
When spammers find loopholes that Google's systems miss, Google releases spam updates that change its systems to catch them.
Spam updates target only spam: they go after sites that churn out millions of low-quality pages to make money, very likely not the site owners and SEOs in the audience.
Google's 'Recoveries' slide said that to recover from a spam update a site should remove the kind of spam Google described in its blog announcements of the update.
A ranking drop after a core update is not a penalty, so technically there is no recovery from a core update in the way there is after a spam update.
Google estimated that a spam update affects sites within 1-2 days of the rollout, 1-2 weeks for continuous processing (said on stage as 2 weeks on average) and months for batch refreshes.
Google's quality talk said Google had released four spam updates in 2026 by the time of the talk on 2 October, with one still rolling out.
The speaker declined to give a timeline for recovering from a spam update, saying the update had targeted spam.
The October 2023 spam update cited in the non-Latin-script talk names neither Persian nor Arabic (only 'other languages') and lists cloaking, hacked, auto-generated and scraped spam, not link spam, so it does not show that the bought links the presenter saw working in Persian or Arabic search were addressed.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · Lightning session G: Internationalisation
Google made 4,781 launches to Search in 2023 while its status dashboard lists nine named ranking updates that year, so almost every change to Search goes unannounced; monitor rankings and traffic continuously, not only around announced core or spam updates.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · How Google thinks about Quality
Kit items about Spam updates: their own words name it, or several of the claims they rest on do.
Also inglossary term Spam update
Things named in the same claim, with the number of claims they share.