Google August 2026 spam update done rolling out
The update took 2.5 days to roll out and is now complete.
Ranking & Algorithms
The stories about Ranking & Algorithms from this period, ranked by likely impact on a single site.
Ranked by estimated impact on a single site, not by publication time.
The update took 2.5 days to roll out and is now complete.
Ranking & Algorithms
Google is replacing site reputation abuse manual actions in the EEA with a system that can rank affected site sections independently.
Ranking & Algorithms Policy & Penalties
Google's spam update caused exceptional search disruption, with dramatic ranking losses across 20 industries, according to SE Ranking data.
Ranking & Algorithms
This week’s SEO Pulse covers Google’s AI publisher dispute, spam update fallout, the GEO debate, AI citation gaps, and ChatGPT’s Reddit behavior in search.
Ranking & Algorithms AI Search & Visibility
The update will take a few days to roll out.
Ranking & Algorithms
This behavior pushes down the core search results and gives you an AI Mode type of experience within the main Google Search interface.
Ranking & Algorithms AI Search & Visibility
Another week, more volatility within the Google Search results. Google is also swapping out direct links to go-to URL redirect links in its search results to protect...
Ranking & Algorithms Site Architecture
Google explains why a named update can shake up rankings without giving affected site owners anything specific to act on.
Ranking & Algorithms
Over the past few days, the IRS website (and other government sites) has tanked within Google's search results. My gut feeling is that the federal government implemented some bot-blocking that was…
Ranking & Algorithms
The most prominent domain was Reddit.com, which showed up in 87.8% of SERPs (83.9% worldwide), with an average of 1.29 link appearances. Along with Ahrefs’ data scientist Xibeijia Guan, I set out to…
Ranking & Algorithms
The evolution of NLP methods and what that means for AI search Before AI,…
Ranking & Algorithms
This regularly updated list of the top 100 domains in US search includes analysis and highlights. The list is created using the SISTRIX Domain Visibility Index values, an indicator of footprint and…
Ranking & Algorithms
Assembled from our own archive of 551 stories, which currently runs from 4 October 2023. Ranking is by the impact score described on the front page — an estimate of how much a story is likely to affect one website, not a measure of how much attention it got.
The archive only holds what it has seen. Periods before it started are empty rather than quiet, and it gets more complete every week it runs.