Sites hit by the August spam update are bouncing back
Google appears to be recalculating its spam scores, and some sites that lost rankings in August are winning them back.
Sites that lost rankings in an earlier spam update are recovering during the latest one. A spam update is a ranking change aimed at sites Google thinks are breaking its rules, and the September one finished rolling out recently.
Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) says he is seeing a wave of these comebacks. He shared an example of a site that was hit by the August spam update and is surging now with the September one. He says several site owners have reached out to him reporting big gains after being hit by previous spam updates.
Why it is happening
Gabe's read is that Google is redoing its spam scoring. If a site gets reevaluated and the new score is better, the site goes back up. He notes that some sites could rise simply because competitors fell, but these moves look bigger than that.
In his own words, the pattern is not a one-off. He wrote that "sites previously impacted by spam updates can recover during subsequent spam updates and I'm seeing a bunch of those now", and said he has a number of them documented with the September update.
sites previously impacted by spam updates can recover during subsequent spam updates and I'm seeing a bunch of those now
He is not the only one noticing. Peter Mindenhall (@petermindenhall) posted that something is afoot with penalised sites he tracks. He said it is not happening to all of them, but it is more than just one or two showing similar signs of life.
On the example site Gabe shared, the recovery was not limited to normal search results. He pointed out that the site also surged into AI Overviews and AI Mode, which are Google's AI-written answers at the top of the page, as it recovered.
What to do
If your rankings dropped during a previous spam update and you have since cleaned up the problem, open Google Search Console, go to the Performance report, and compare the last 28 days with the previous period. Look at the second half of September. A real recovery shows up as a sustained climb, not a single good day.
If you see nothing, that does not mean nothing is coming. Gabe's point is that these reevaluations happen when a new spam update runs, not continuously. The sites he is seeing recover waited from August to September.
If your site was never hit, there is nothing to do here. The useful takeaway is that a spam update hit is not permanent. Google rescores sites each time it runs one, and sites that fixed thin, mass-produced or duplicated pages can climb back.
This is not the case with all penalised sites I have eyes on (which is many) - but it is more than just 1 or 2 showing similar signs of life
Be the person who already knew
One email a day. Under three minutes. You will hear about a Google change before it shows up in your traffic.