March 2026 Spam Update
Google announced on 24th March 2026 that a new Spam Update was coming to Search and that it would take a few days. Considering that the last Spam Update in August last year took almost four weeks to implement, we in the SEO industry took that time estimate with a grain of salt.
However, today, less than twenty-four hours after they started, Google announced that the update was finished. That makes it the quickest update Google have ever announced (stealing that crown from the October 2022 Spam Update, which took two days). This raises more questions than it answers.
What Does a Spam Update Do?
Pretty much what it says on the tin. Google are always looking for ways to fulfil the core mission of their search engine; to help people find a useful answer to their search query. The dark side of SEO has resulted in an industry that tries to get any old dross appearing for search queries, and Google wants to prevent those from manipulating the search results.
That’s what the Spam Update does. It doesn’t set out to specifically penalise individual sites, it merely redefines the rules of what is and isn’t spammy and unhelpful content, and then promotes other helpful websites over it.
What Does This Spam Update in Particular Do?
Honestly? We don’t know. Yet. People in the know at Google rarely come out and say exactly what their updates are targeting, but we experts can generally tell after the fact what an update has accomplished (whether or not that was the intended result is another matter).
There are a few spammy techniques that have come to the fore since the August 2025 Spam Update, any of which Google might be targeting with this update. These techniques are mostly updated versions of older black hat SEO techniques.
Manipulating content to be found in AI citations, such as with listicles or fake personas, is quickly becoming the new keyword stuffing. While parasite SEO has gone to new areas with bot networks flooding social media with citations, to take advantage of the fact that brand mentions are now as valuable as actual links.
Why We Care
Google does updates all of the time, and those of us in the SEO industry always pay attention. The white hats (those who follow the rules and guidelines set out by Google), are always hoping to see their websites improve in visibility at the expense of those who try to manipulate the search results. We’re also always a little concerned that something outside of our control will impact one of our sites and we’ll have to do more work to recover from either a false positive or an edge case.
In this case, the fact that Google went to the effort of announcing an update (rather than their new tactic of small updates happening all the time), and that it was a spam update, and that it completed in 19½ hours, tells us a few things.
Google knew exactly what they were targeting with this update, and that it was distinct enough that they could do precisely.
Google wanted everyone in the industry to know that they were targeting it.
Whatever the change is, we should see over the next few days who has had their search results presence impacted.
