It looks like Google’s August Spam Update really shook up the search results 😁

The first somewhat concrete figures regarding the impact of Google’s August 2026 Spam Update have emerged.
SE Ranking analyzed 100,000 keywords in the U.S. across 20 different niches and compared ranking movements during the update to a typical period without confirmed Google updates.

And the numbers are interesting.
During the Spam Update, 16.71% of URLs that were in the TOP 10 dropped out of the TOP 100.

By comparison, during the control period, this figure was 9.2%.
In other words, the number of pages that dropped from the Top 10 straight out of the Top 100 was approximately 82% higher than during a typical period.
Another interesting point is that the movement wasn’t just downward.

SE Ranking recorded a 12% increase in the number of URLs in the Top 3 that hadn’t even been in the Top 20 before the update.
In other words, Google’s search results were thoroughly shaken up: some dropped far beyond the 100th position, while others, on the contrary, shot up very quickly.
Moreover, this volatility was observed across all 20 niches analyzed.
In the top 10, it ranged from 74.64% in Real Estate to 85.55% in Fashion & Beauty. At the same time, YMYL categories—particularly real estate and healthcare—proved to be among the relatively more stable ones.

But there’s an important point here.
This data doesn’t show exactly why Google penalized these sites.
SE Ranking did not conduct a detailed analysis of the URLs or domains that lost rankings, so it’s not possible to conclude from this study that Google, for example, has started penalizing a specific type of content, backlinks, or spam techniques more severely.

Similarly, we don’t know whether the pages that fell out of the top 100 were deindexed or simply dropped below the 100th position.
But the sheer scale of the shift is telling in itself.
A +82% increase in URLs that dropped out of the top 10 and fell outside the top 100 compared to a typical period—that’s no longer just standard search ranking turbulence.
So if your rankings dropped sharply somewhere after the August update, I definitely wouldn’t start rewriting half the site right away.

First, you need to properly analyze the drop: which URLs lost their rankings, which search queries, which sites took their place, and whether there’s any pattern among these pages.
Because Google has seriously shaken up the search results. But exactly who and why—that’s the most interesting part for SEOs 😁

#SEO #Google #SpamUpdate #GoogleUpdate #SEOTools

Source on Telegram