Google started rolling out August 2026 Spam Update on 18 August 2026 (12:30 PM ET) and the rollout was completed on 21 August 2026 (4:50AM ET). Update was global and impacted search rankings everywhere but interestingly enough there was a lot of chatter on X about this update specifically from SEOs based out of France.
During the rollout of this update, what I noticed is that many SEOs from France and who are doing running websites in French language were impacted a lot.
For example, Laurent, he shared this post on X where he showed a graph of a domain and the graph was suddenly showing a massive drop. And Laurent wrote “We also need to talk about its failures, not just its successes. A spam update, dozens of sites that had 10 years of stable history reduced to nothing. I lost 10k visitors per day in 1 day. 🫣”
This is another example from Raoul, he also shared a similar graph as Laurent did. And Raoul wrote – “Good game! Another site down by Google AI spam update. While the content is actually helpful for the users…🙃”
While a lot of domains were impact but still some SEOs on X were saying domains which are impacted sort of deserved to be hit. Like Kaostyl wrote this on X – “Let’s be honest, the Google spam update has screwed over almost exclusively sites that deserved it… well, so what? You do spam, that’s the game, right? You can’t take something like that for granted…
You spam, you have to know you can lose everything overnight, that’s NORMAL
Me, I spam and I’ve lost more times than I’ve won, I lost over 200 sites to Penguin in 2012 so lessons learned… I’ve gotten banned hundreds of times and once again, that’s normal…
Nothing is ever guaranteed and relying solely on an online biz is suicide…
And don’t think switching the spam to YouTube is gonna save you, it’s even more demanding
Anyway, good luck to everyone”.
Now what to do if you were impacted?
It’s pretty simple – don’t do anything which goes against Google’s spam policies and guidelines.
Start the conversation by posting the first comment