The September 2026 spam update hit a second time on September 30 and October 1, and site owners reported sharp drops on the 30th specifically. This update is rolling out over roughly two weeks instead of the usual two days, which means what you saw last week may not be what you end up with. Here is what happened and why you should not be making changes yet.
What Happened
Google announced the September 2026 spam update on September 24, 2026. The first wave of movement landed between September 25 and 27, which is the part most people already felt.
Then it moved again. Volatility picked back up on September 30 and October 1, and the tracking tools showed it. Mozcast, Wincher, Semrush, and Zutrix Tension all registered elevated fluctuation across those two days.
Glenn Gabe, who tracks this closely, described it as a specific change on September 30 and said he received emails from several site owners reporting a huge drop right on that date. That lines up with what showed in the trackers and with chatter in the webmaster forums.
Google Did Not Call It Phase Two
This is worth being precise about, because the wording gets repeated loosely. Google never formally announced a phase two. There is no second announcement and no new update name.
What Google did say, back when it announced the update, is that this one would roll out over about two weeks with multiple impact cycles, which is different from how its recent spam updates have behaved. So a second wave of movement is consistent with what Google described, even though Google did not label it.
Phase two is the industry's word for it, not Google's. I would keep that distinction in mind when somebody tells you confidently what phase three is going to do.
Why You Should Wait
The rollout is not finished. Making structural changes to a site in the middle of a multi-phase update is how you end up unable to tell what caused what.
If you dropped on September 26, recovered partially, and dropped again on September 30, you do not yet have a number that means anything. The same is true in the other direction. Gains during a rollout can give some of themselves back before it completes.
There is a second reason to be careful about the data in front of you right now. Rank tracking has been less reliable than usual since Google started blocking scrapers, so a position change in your tool is not automatically a position change in the search results. Check Search Console impressions and clicks alongside it before you conclude anything.
My Take
Spam updates are different from core updates and people keep treating them the same way. A core update is a reassessment of quality across the board. A spam update is Google enforcing its spam policies, which is narrower and more specific.
If you got hit by a spam update, the honest first question is whether anything on your site is actually touching a spam policy. Scaled content abuse, site reputation abuse, and expired domain abuse are the big three. That is an uncomfortable audit to run on your own site, and most people skip straight to blaming the algorithm.
Keep in mind, recovery is not fast even when you fix the right thing. Google has said plainly that ranking recovery can take months after you make changes, and a multi-phase rollout stretches that further. Our breakdown of why ranking recovery takes months covers what that actually looks like.
What To Do Right Now
- Log the dates. Write down exactly when your traffic moved. September 26 and September 30 are different events and you will want to be able to tell them apart later.
- Use Search Console, not just your rank tracker. Impressions and clicks by query and by page, comparing the week before to the week after.
- Find out which pages moved, not just how much. A sitewide drop and a drop concentrated in one content type point to completely different problems.
- Read the spam policies honestly. Then check your own site against them before you assume this was unfair.
- Wait for the rollout to finish before you make structural changes. Fixing a genuine spam policy violation is the exception. Do that now.
If you are also auditing your rank tracking setup through this, our rundown of keyword research and rank tracking tools is worth a look, because several of them have been reporting differently than they were a month ago.
Question to Answer:
Do you know whether your traffic moved on September 26, on September 30, or on both, and can you name the specific pages that moved rather than just the total?
In Summary
The September 2026 spam update produced a second round of movement on September 30 and October 1, with site owners reporting sharp drops on the 30th. Google said up front this one would roll out over about two weeks with multiple impact cycles, so this is the update behaving as described rather than a new one.
Document your dates, verify movement in Search Console rather than your rank tracker alone, and hold off on structural changes until the rollout finishes. The exception is a real spam policy violation, which you should fix today.
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