Google's spam update finishes, a talk recap puts site moves in months, Search Console combines countries, and new guidance targets fake author profiles.

Welcome to the Pulse: This week’s updates include tips on reading spam update data, understanding how long crawling and recovery might take, exploring how Search Console totals multiple countries, insights on how Google handles fake author profiles, and an overview of how AI crawlers detect sitemaps.

Google’s September 2026 spam update finished rolling out on Oct. 8, according to the Google Search Status Dashboard.

The rollout started on Sept. 24, with Google’s ranking update history noting it took about 13 days and 16 hours, close to the “up to two weeks” timeframe Google initially provided. This year’s three previous spam updates were completed in less than three days each. According to rank-tracking platform SEOmonitor, from Sept. 26, industry-wide rank trackers observed sudden ranking changes that people searching Google didn’t see, which it attributes to incomplete and inaccurate data returned by Google to automated search tools.

Now that the rollout is complete, you have a set window, Sept. 24 to Oct. 8, for comparing Search Console performance before, during, and after the update as more data comes in. According to SEOmonitor, real spam update changes usually stick around across consecutive days and are often visible in Search Console impressions and clicks. So, it’s a good idea to check those before interpreting a late-September drop in your rank tracker as an update effect.

Read our full coverage: Google Completes September 2026 Spam Update After Nearly 14 Days

Source link