For the record, here is the timeline of the ranking event that has defined the last month in Google Search. The Google September 2026 spam update began rolling out on Thursday, September 24, 2026 at around 12:00 pm ET, and Google marked it complete on October 8, 2026 at 4:37 am ET — a two-week rollout, long for a spam update.
By the community’s reading, the update did not land in one blow. It moved in three distinct waves of volatility: September 25 through 27, September 30, and October 4 through 6, with rankings and traffic lurching at each step before the rollout closed. Sites that saw movement only in one window may have been touched by a specific part of the spam systems being refreshed rather than by the whole update.
Two footnotes matter for what comes next. First, the update was preceded by earlier unconfirmed turbulence around September 23-24 and mid-September weirdness, so not every September swing belongs to it. Second, there has been a noticeable ongoing increase in manual actions — human-issued Google penalties — running alongside the algorithmic work. If your October numbers look strange, start with our report on the fresh volatility and chatter spike the community is seeing now.
Source: Search Engine Roundtable
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