Website owners are reporting another burst of ranking changes during Google’s September 2026 spam update, with renewed movement around September 30 and October 1 following earlier disruption.
Barry Schwartz’s Search Engine Roundtable report brings together SEO observations and tracking charts suggesting another wave. Google’s official announcement describes a single global update covering all languages, which began September 24 and could take up to two weeks. Its status dashboard still marked the rollout active on October 2.
The timing follows SEW’s report on the initial release. Google has not announced a separate second update or identified a new policy target for this latest movement.
The rollout makes diagnosis harder
A site that held steady during the opening days can still move later in an unfinished rollout. The renewed observations therefore give affected publishers a useful date to examine, while leaving the cause of an individual site’s loss unresolved.
For a site that fell around September 30, compare the affected pages and queries in Search Console with the earlier rollout period. A decline concentrated in one page type creates a different investigation from a fall across every section. Record deployments and indexing changes alongside those dates so the update’s timing does not erase other possible explanations.
Ranking charts can show when visibility changed. Diagnosing a spam-policy problem requires evidence from the affected site, rather than treating every downward line during the rollout as a policy verdict.
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