Red Isle WebIf the phone rang less in early October and you then read that Google had a spam update running, it is natural to put the two together and wonder what your website did wrong. Google started the September 2026 spam update on September 24 and finished it on October 8, which is a long enough window that almost any change in your enquiries could be pinned on it.
For an ordinary local business with a site written for its own customers, the risk is very low. Google did not say what the update targeted, and the spam policies it enforces describe things like buying old domain names and publishing pages in bulk, which a normal small business site does not do.
What did Google say about this update?
Google's Search Status Dashboard lists it as the September 2026 spam update, with a start date and no description, and the coverage I found reported no explanation from Google of what changed. Google's documentation says its spam detection runs all the time and that a spam update is a notable improvement to those systems, with SpamBrain, its AI-based spam-prevention system, as one example. The earlier spam updates this year each wrapped up within about three days. This one took 13 days and 16 hours, according to Google's ranking update history, and Search Engine Journal pointed out that neither Google note says why.
What do Google's spam policies cover?
Say someone buys the lapsed website address of a Charlottetown restaurant that closed years ago and fills it with unrelated pages so they inherit the old name's standing. That is expired domain abuse, which Google defines as buying an expired domain and repurposing it mainly to manipulate search rankings.
Scaled content abuse is generating many pages mainly to manipulate rankings, usually large amounts of unoriginal, low-value content, and no single-location business ends up there by accident. Site reputation abuse is putting third-party content on a trusted site mainly because of that site's established ranking strength, say a coupon company renting space on a respected newspaper's website.
Fake and paid-for reviews fall under separate rules for Google Maps, not the Search spam policies. Google's review policy says incentivized reviews are not allowed and will be removed, and it bars a business from offering payment, discounts, or free goods or services in exchange for a review. That is the item a well-meaning owner is most likely to trip over, say with a free coffee for anyone who leaves five stars, and I wrote up how to ask for reviews without offering anything back.
My traffic changed in October. Was it the spam update?
It might have been, but the dates alone do not show it, because a rollout of nearly two weeks overlaps with whatever else moved your enquiries in that stretch, like the season or a slow week. The data from the first days is thin too. Diib, an analytics company, compared 32,569 sites over September 24 to 26 against the same days a week earlier and found the median share of visits from unpaid Google search fell from 34 percent to 31 percent, and it called that an early read. SEOmonitor reported that many rank-tracking tools showed sudden ranking changes that searchers never saw, which it put down to incomplete results Google returned to automated searches.
The first place to look is the Manual actions report in Search Console, Google's free tool that shows site owners how Google sees their site. It lists penalties applied after a human reviewer at Google decided pages on the site break its spam policies. A green check mark means there are none. Algorithmic changes do not appear there, so a clean check rules out a person at Google acting on your site, not an automated change.
But my rankings did drop. What now?
Google's advice for a site that sees a change after a spam update is to review its spam policies, and it says fixing violations may help a site improve. Its systems can need a period of months to recognize that a site now complies, so any recovery is slow. Take stock of anything on your site that matches the list above, and fix it.
The good news
Writing your own pages for your own customers and using the domain you registered yourself keeps you clear of the three search spam policies above, and the review rule comes down to not paying for reviews.
The one spot worth a second look is any page written with AI that nobody read over before it went live. Google's policy is aimed at pages published in volume to catch searches, and a handful of pages that someone wrote or checked for their customers is a different thing. I covered the AI side of it in the post on whether Google penalizes AI-written sites.
Every site I build at Red Isle Web is written for the business it belongs to and sits on a domain you own outright, for Island businesses, at a one-time price with no monthly fee. If your enquiries dropped in the last few weeks and you want to know why, send me a note and I will check your Search Console for a manual action and go through your site for anything on Google's spam policy list.