Google’s September 2026 spam update produced a second burst of ranking volatility on Sept. 30, according to Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable, who wrote on Oct. 1 that impact continued into that day. The rollout has not finished. Our earlier report covered the first spike over the Sept. 25 to 27 weekend, so this is the follow-up.
Schwartz says Google announced the update on Sept. 24 and told him the rollout would run about two weeks, unlike the previous three spam updates, which took about two days. He therefore expects several cycles, each hitting a different set of days, and says the update may bring “two or three or maybe even more days of impact.”
Glenn Gabe posted his own read on X on Oct. 1: “I believe we saw a specific change on 9/30.” Gabe added that several site owners emailed him about a huge drop on exactly that date. Those are owner reports passed along by a respected analyst, not a Google statement.
Forum chatter points the same way, though it is anecdotal. In the comments on Schwartz’s earlier post, one reader wrote “Today something happened again. Traffic dead.” On WebmasterWorld, members said Discover traffic had vanished on Sept. 30, while another called Discover swings “normal with an update like this.”
Schwartz also lists the trackers he checked: Mozcast, Wincher, Zutrix Tension, Semrush, Wireboard’s aggregate chart, Serpstat, AccuRanker’s Grump, DataForSEO, Mangools SERPWatcher, AWR, CognitiveSEO, SimilarWeb, Algoroo, and Sistrix. These tools measure SERP churn across many queries. They do not tell you why your pages moved.
That gap is where your own data matters. Treat Sept. 30 and Oct. 1 as a separate event from the weekend. In Search Console, compare daily clicks and impressions across three windows: before Sept. 25, the weekend, and Sept. 30 onward. A site that fell only in the last window was likely untouched by the first wave. A site that fell in both has a different problem than one that fell once.
Log each affected URL with its query set, the date the decline began, the page template, and the country. Gabe’s separate notes on Reddit’s AI translations surging in Italy, Germany, Brazil, and France show why country splits count: movement can differ by market. Keep Discover and News traffic in their own column, since forum reports describe those surfaces swinging within a single day.
Do not start remediation mid-rollout. Schwartz expects impact on some days and calm on others, so a quiet day proves nothing about recovery or safety. Cutting content or disavowing links on the strength of one chart risks changing the wrong thing before Google has said what the update targets. The source does not report a Google statement on what Sept. 30 represents.
Keep the log running daily until Google marks the update complete, then compare the full set of windows before deciding whether any change is warranted.
Barry Schwartz reported the second wave of the September 2026 spam update for Search Engine Roundtable on October 1, 2026.
