Spam update hit hardest over the weekend
Friday looked quiet, then rankings moved sharply across several countries.
Google's September spam update did most of its damage over the weekend, not on the day it launched. Glenn Gabe, who tracks around 1,500 sites hit by earlier spam updates, says Friday showed only early signs and then the weekend brought big drops across many countries and many industries. He has sites documented that fell heavily in the US, UK, France, Italy and Germany.
A spam update is a ranking change aimed at sites that break Google's spam rules. Google announced this one on Thursday and said it would take about two weeks to finish rolling out, which is longer than its recent spam updates.
What is getting hit
Gabe says he is not seeing Google go after anything new yet. The drops he is digging into look like "scaled content abuse", programmatic scaling, and thin affiliate sites. In plain terms, that means pages churned out in bulk from a template with little real answer on them, and pages built mainly to push readers to someone else's product. He says it is basically the same pattern he saw with the August spam update.
He also flags examples of what he calls "Mt. AI" and "Mt. Programmatic", his shorthand for the traffic shape sites get from mass produced content, sometimes AI generated, sometimes template driven, sometimes both.
Because the rollout runs about two weeks, Gabe says Google might still be targeting other things that have not shown up yet.
What this means for you
If your site is a normal small business site with pages you actually wrote, this is not aimed at you. The pattern in the data is bulk pages, not regular publishing.
One detail worth holding on to. Gabe says he also saw a lot of movement in early to mid September that was not part of the official spam update, including drops on 9/4 that partly reversed. So if your rankings moved before Thursday, that was something else.
Barry Schwartz reported the day after launch that tracking tools were showing a spike in volatility, meaning rankings were jumping around more than usual.
If your traffic dropped over the weekend, open Google Analytics or Search Console and compare last week to this week by page, so you can see whether the loss sits on a few thin pages or across the whole site. If it is one cluster of near duplicate pages, that is your answer. If nothing dropped, do nothing and wait for the rollout to finish.
I shared on Friday about the update starting to show itself, but this weekend it *really* showed itself.
I see a lot of "scaled content abuse", programmatic scaling, more thin affiliate situations, etc.