Spam Update Rolling Out
Google's September 2026 spam update is the main weather system today. It started September 24 at 9:15 a.m. PDT, applies globally in all languages, and may take up to two weeks to finish. Search Engine Journal notes this is the fourth confirmed spam update of 2026, after March, June, and August. Search Engine Roundtable adds that this rollout is expected to run longer than the recent spam updates, so don't judge winners and losers too early.
Rankings Are Getting Choppier
The SERP forecast is windy and unstable. Today's partial volatility score is 6.8/10, with several providers already flashing hot while others remain calm. That split usually means movement is uneven by niche, not invisible. The trend matters more: rankings cooled briefly on September 21-22, then climbed again from 5.3 to 5.8 to 6.8 as the spam update arrived.
Search Engine Land and Search Engine Roundtable both flagged the update and related ranking movement as the top SEO story, while Google has not named a specific spam tactic. Translation for site owners: if traffic drops, do not panic-edit every page today. First compare Search Console data by page, query, and date against September 24.
Search Console Gets More Visual
Google also rolled out multimodal Search performance reporting, showing when people find pages through Lens, Circle to Search, image uploads, or Chrome's "Search this image." Search Engine Journal points out the catch: this traffic shows pages, but not normal keyword query data. For ecommerce, recipes, local services, and visual brands, image quality just became easier to measure.
What to Do
- Wait for the rollout to settle before declaring a loss.
- Review thin, copied, doorway, scaled, or deceptive content.
- Check image-heavy pages in Search Console once multimodal data appears.
- If hit, fix policy problems, then expect recovery to take months, not days.
