What changed
Google’s September 2026 spam update began on Sept. 24 and wrapped up on Oct. 8, running close to two full weeks. That is far longer than this year’s three earlier spam updates, which each finished in under three days. Rank-tracking platform SEOmonitor reported that, starting Sept. 26, many tracking tools picked up ranking swings that real searchers never saw. It blamed incomplete and inaccurate data that Google returned to automated tools.
Several other updates arrived the same week:
- Timing ranges: At a Google Search Central event in Barcelona on Oct. 2, Gary Illyes shared ranges for crawling, indexing and recovery. A recap by attendee John Campbell of ROAST says a typical site migration takes roughly one to three months, while the slowest can stretch from six months to over a year. Recovery from a core update usually takes around three to six months, and can take up to a year. The recap does not explain what counts as typical.
- Search Console: The Performance report now lets you pick several countries or devices and see their combined numbers.
- Author profiles: Google’s people-first content guidance now warns against AI-generated headshots, invented names and false credentials used to make content look written by human experts.
- Sitemaps: Google’s John Mueller said AI training crawlers rarely offer a way to submit a sitemap. He suggested a default sitemap.xml file or an RSS feed. He also tied “Couldn’t fetch” errors on valid sitemaps to host load or crawl demand, which often reflects how Google views a site’s quality.
Why it matters
If your rank tracker showed a sharp drop in late September, it may not reflect what customers actually saw. The timing ranges also give you a realistic yardstick for a website move or a recovery effort, so you can set expectations instead of panicking after a few weeks. Fake or inflated author bios now carry clear risk, since Google calls that kind of deception a sign of a low-quality page.
What to do
- Compare Search Console clicks and impressions before, during and after the Sept. 24 to Oct. 8 window before blaming the update for any drop.
- Look for changes that hold across several days, not single-day spikes in tracking tools.
- Treat the timing ranges as rough guides, not deadlines, when planning a site migration.
- Review bylines and author pages. Make sure every name, photo and credential is real and accurate.
- Use a standard sitemap.xml name, list it in robots.txt, and consider an RSS feed so other crawlers can find your content.
- If you report on several markets, use the new multi-country filter to pull one combined figure.
Source: Google Ends Spam Update, Shares Crawl Timing Ranges – SEO Pulse, Search Engine Journal. This brief sums up their reporting; all credit for the original goes to them.
