Google Completes Spam Update After 13 Days, 10% of Sites Lose Half Their Traffic

Google announced the completion of its September 2026 anti-spam update on October 8, after running for 13 days and 16 hours, making it the longest update of its kind this year. According to the official Google Search Status Dashboard, the update took significantly longer than those in March (19 hours and 30 minutes), June (2 days and 1 hour), and August (2 days and 16 hours).

The update rolled out on September 24, with its waves spaced out until October 6, an unusual pattern for spam updates that typically finish in a day or two. Google did not specify what the update targeted exactly.

In a preliminary analysis conducted by the platform "Deep" across 32,569 websites, the median share of traffic coming from organic Google search dropped from 34% to 31%. Additionally, 10% of websites experienced a drop of half or more, indicating that the impact was not evenly distributed across sites.

Website owners and publishers follow these updates closely because any shift in rankings directly affects organic traffic, which is a major source of traffic for news websites and e-commerce stores in the Arab region. The length of this update turns monitoring rankings into an ongoing task rather than a single event that ends with the completion announcement.

What do these terms mean?

Spam Update: A change in Google's ranking system targeting websites that circumvent guidelines to manipulate their search rankings.

Organic Traffic: Visits that reach a website from search results without paid advertising, also known as organic visits.

Search Engine Ranking: The position where a website or page appears on Google search result pages when searching for a specific keyword.

Statistical Median: The middle value in a set of numbers when ordered, used to measure the overall trend without the influence of extreme outliers.