Google spam update: Why your traffic dropped in September?

At the end of September, Google started rolling out a new spam update. The rollout is not finished. Rankings are still moving this week, and many companies are now looking at a traffic graph that has lost a fifth of its volume in seven days.

Most website owners make the same mistake at this point. They open their own website, see nothing wrong, and decide the drop is temporary and will correct itself. Sometimes it does. More often it does not, because spam updates do not work the way a normal core update works.

The difference you need to understand

A core update re-weighs which pages are the most useful for a given search. Think of it as new rules for the same game. Everyone is still allowed to play, but the rules have changed.

A spam update works in a different way. It does not weigh content quality in the same sense. It checks whether your content breaks Google's spam policies. A site that breaks them does not only lose position, it loses the ability to rank at all. The drops are sharper, they come suddenly, and they do not recover on their own without changes to the site. If you have looked for the cause of a ranking drop in Google before, your first job is to tell these two events apart, because they lead to completely different actions.

A drop that lasts two or three days and then settles at a new, slightly lower level is usually a re-shuffle from a core update. A drop that takes half of the organic traffic from one section of your pages within a week, while the rest of the site works normally, points to a spam policy violation in the content.

What Google wants the update to do

Google's spam policies are published openly. In practice, companies run into four of them most often.

The first is mass content production with no added value. Google calls this scaled content abuse. It covers cases where a company publishes 100 AI generated articles in three months, with no data of its own, no experience from practice and no editorial review. One detail matters here: Google does not penalise the use of AI in writing. It penalises publishing content that adds nothing for the reader. A sensible content strategy is therefore a safer path than a production schedule.

The second is site reputation abuse. This is when third party content sits on an established domain in order to use its authority. It usually appears as guest posts on a company website, or as a news section run by an outside agency with nobody at the company checking it. Google tightened this policy further in August 2026.

The third is expired domain abuse. Buying a domain with history and authority in order to build something completely unrelated on it is one of the fastest ways to lose all the visibility you have. If you are thinking about buying a domain for a new line of business, it is worth understanding first what domain authority really is and what happens when you replace the content on it.

The fourth is dozens of almost identical pages built for single search terms that only push the visitor onward. Fifteen pages that read "website development Celje", "website development Kranj" and so on, differing only in the name of the town, are a clear example of this practice.

An example from practice

Take a cosmetics retailer with a web shop that works well. Last year the company decided to grow organic traffic and hired an outside content writer who promised 20 new posts a month. The posts were produced by machine, all to the same pattern, with keywords swapped out here and there. For the first five months traffic did grow, from 5,000 to 9,000 visits a month.

At the end of September, traffic fell to 4,500 in nine days, below the starting point. A closer look showed that the shop part, meaning the category and product pages, had lost nothing. The whole drop happened on the blog, which had grown to 100 posts in five months and was bringing three quarters of the organic traffic. Sales did not change, because the new articles were not contributing to sales, only to the number of organic visitors, which for a web shop is not necessarily a good thing.

Websites and web shops that add a large amount of content in a short time are better off considering the removal of weak content. Removing content can even improve where the site ranks.

Three steps to find out if this applies to your website

The first step is to split the site into its sections: news, services, products and so on. In Google Search Console, compare the last 14 days with the period before it and filter by section. If the drop is spread evenly across the whole site, you are probably ranking lower because of content quality. If only one section is affected, a spam policy problem is likely.

The second step is an editorial review of that section. Pick 10 articles and answer one question for each: what is in it that the reader cannot find in the first three search results. If there is no answer, the article is not doing its job.

The third step is a check of the technical side, because the faults often sit in the settings of the website rather than in the text. Duplicate pages, automatically generated tag pages and incorrect redirects very quickly create the appearance of mass content with no value.

Why this matters more this year than before

Two things have changed. The first is that spam updates are more frequent. Four were recorded on Google's public search status dashboard this year, in March, June, August and September. The second is less visible. Content that Google marks as spam also drops out of AI summaries and out of the answers of large language models such as ChatGPT and Claude, because these draw on the same pool of results. You lose visibility twice. New ways to measure, such as the AI report in Google Search Console, show this double drop far more clearly than before.

Content tactics have to be different today. It is not about how much you publish, but about provable authorship and expertise. The authority signals that Google and AI recognise are created outside your website: in mentions, in good quality backlinks and in the profiles of the people who are experts in the field. Structured data that is set up properly helps here, because it tells the search engine who the author is and what the page offers.

What to watch for

Three conclusions are useful whether or not the update has affected your website.

1. A drop in traffic is not a diagnosis on its own. Telling a core update apart from a spam update decides whether you will improve content or remove it. The wrong choice costs you months of hard work to get back to the results you already had.
2. The risk with AI generated content is not the tool, it is the absence of editorial judgement. Fifty posts written without your own knowledge and experience are more dangerous than five posts written with it.
3. Content that you pay someone else to write and that nobody at your company reads is the most common cause of these drops. Editorial responsibility cannot be handed to an outside company that writes in your name.

How we approach this at Kabi

We build websites and web shops on our own content management platform, CMS Bananadmin, which means we control how page addresses, redirects, tags and structured data are created. This is where most of the technical problems start that a search engine reads as mass content with no value.

Our SEO optimization services start with an audit that separates technical causes from content causes. We then prepare a plan for what gets written again, what gets merged and what gets removed.

If you have seen a drop in traffic in the last two weeks and you do not know whether the cause is the algorithm or something else, get in touch with us.