Originally Posted on The Search Herald by Search Engine Land
Google’s June 2024 spam update rollout is now complete. The spam update started June 20, 2024, about 7 days ago.
This update was a general and broad spam update, it was not a link spam update and did not automate the site reputation abuse policy, which is still only done via manual actions.
Google wrote this morning, “The rollout was complete as of June 27, 2024.”
Here’s our past coverage of confirmed Google spam updates:
Why we care. If you noticed your rankings changed during this time frame, it may be related to the June 2024 spam update. Maybe your rankings improved because your competitors were hurt by this update. Maybe your rankings declined because Google thinks you were going against its spam policies.
Spam updates. Here are the official Google spam updates documentation:
While Google’s automated systems to detect search spam are constantly operating, we occasionally make notable improvements to how they work. When we do, we refer to this as a spam update and share when they happen on our list of Google Search ranking updates.
For example, SpamBrain is our AI-based spam-prevention system. From time-to-time, we improve that system to make it better at spotting spam and to help ensure it catches new types of spam.
Sites that see a change after a spam update should review our spam policies to ensure they are complying with those. Sites that violate our policies may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all. Making changes may help a site improve if our automated systems learn over a period of months that the site complies with our spam policies.
In the case of a link spam update (an update that specifically deals with link spam), making changes might not generate an improvement. This is because when our systems remove the effects spammy links may have, any ranking benefit the links may have previously generated for your site is lost. Any potential ranking benefits generated by those links cannot be regained.
