Google starts its September spam update and warns it may take two weeks

Google has launched the September 2026 spam update: the rollout began on 24 September at 9:15 Pacific time. In the Search Status Dashboard the company wrote that the update applies globally and to all languages, so Ukrainian sites are affected exactly as English-language ones are. Search Engine Journal reported it first.

A rollout that may stretch to two weeks

Google does not promise that the update will run for fourteen days. The phrase "up to two weeks" describes a ceiling, and a ceiling is not a forecast.

Compare it with what happened earlier this year:

The stated allowance is roughly five times the actual length of the August update.

I'd not plan around fourteen days. The three previous rollouts finished within two to three days, and against that background the ceiling looks like insurance.

Turning it into a rule does not work either: four updates are far too small a sample. So it is safer to plan your traffic analysis for a long tail. We covered how the August spam update played out separately: the first ranking shifts were visible within a day or two, while the final picture only settled after the rollout ended.

How to read traffic charts while the update is running

While the rollout continues, rankings swing, and conclusions drawn on day one are almost always wrong.

Google advises anyone who sees fluctuations to check their site against its spam policies. The same note says that demonstrating compliance over a longer period, on the scale of months, may help recover visibility. There will be no quick "fixed it today, back tomorrow".

In practice that means:

• mark 24 September as your reference point and compare individual sections and page types, not the whole site at once;
• do not rewrite texts in bulk and do not delete pages until the dashboard shows the update is complete;
• look separately at everything that traditionally falls under the spam policies: bought links, mass-generated pages for cities and queries, old domains with new content hung on them.

On the Ukrainian market the risk usually sits in links and in templated regional landing pages. If those are what you have been scaling over the past six months, checking your link profile and site structure makes sense right now, before the update ends, so that you have something to compare against later.

The fourth update in less than nine months

March, June, August, September: Google ships confirmed spam updates almost every quarter, and in the second half of the year even more often.

We were tracking the August one only a month ago, and here comes the next. For sites living on the edge of the policies, that means sitting out the gaps between updates is no longer an option.

I am curious whether Google will fit into the usual two or three days, as in August, or actually use the whole allowance this time. The answer will be on the Search Status Dashboard — for the next two weeks I'll be watching it more closely than my own ranking charts.

Related reading: Google SpamBrain: How the Anti-Spam Algorithm Works · SEO site audit