Google Ends Spam Update, Shares Crawl Timing Ranges – SEO Pulse via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern
All Paid Media PPC News Social MediaAdvertising Video Advertising Columns Ask A PPC ExpertNEW PPC Pulse Guide AI Max Invalid Traffic Doubled, Weeks Before Black Friday Invalid traffic on AI Max search doubled to 5.28%. Get the channel-by-channel retail benchmarks before Black Friday. Digital Marketing All Digital Marketing Analytics & Data Ecommerce Lead Generation Content Marketing Social Platforms Google YouTube Reddit LinkedIn TikTokNEW WordPress Other CMS Platforms Guide Your ChatGPT Calls Are Hiding in the 'Direct/Other' Bucket Calls from ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity land in 'direct/other.' This checklist shows six steps to track them as their own source. SEJ Live Webinars Rundowns PodcastNEW Ebooks All Resources Webinar Fix The Product Pages AI Shopping Agents Skip In this webinar, learn to rewrite spec-sheet product copy into the words shoppers use, and make product pages readable to AI. SEJ ⋅ SEO Pulse Google Ends Spam Update, Shares Crawl Timing Ranges – SEO Pulse Google's September spam update finished on Oct. 8 after 13 days and 16 hours. An attendee recap lists site moves at one to three months typical, without defining typical. Search Console can now combine traffic from multiple countries in its Performance report. Google's spam update finishes, a talk recap puts site moves in months, Search Console combines countries, and new guidance targets fake author profiles. SEJ STAFF Matt G. Southern 1 minute ago ⋅ 6 min read SEJ STAFF Matt G. Southern Senior News Writer at Search Engine Journal Bio Follow Welcome to the Pulse: This week’s updates include tips on reading spam update data, understanding how long crawling and recovery might take, exploring how Search Console totals multiple countries, insights on how Google handles fake author profiles, and an overview of how AI crawlers detect sitemaps. Google’s September 2026 spam update finished rolling out on Oct. 8, according to the Google Search Status Dashboard. The rollout started on Sept. 24, with Google’s ranking update history noting it took about 13 days and 16 hours, close to the “up to two weeks” timeframe Google initially provided. This year’s three previous spam updates were completed in less than three days each. According to rank-tracking platform SEOmonitor, from Sept. 26, industry-wide rank trackers observed sudden ranking changes that people searching Google didn’t see, which it attributes to incomplete and inaccurate data returned by Google to automated search tools. Now that the rollout is complete, you have a set window, Sept. 24 to Oct. 8, for comparing Search Console performance before, during, and after the update as more data comes in. According to SEOmonitor, real spam update changes usually stick around across consecutive days and are often visible in Search Console impressions and clicks. So, it’s a good idea to check those before interpreting a late-September drop in your rank tracker as an update effect. Read our full coverage: Google Completes September 2026 Spam Update After Nearly 14 Days Google’s Gary Illyes showed timing ranges for crawling, indexing, site moves, and core update recovery at Search Central Live Deep Dive Europe in Barcelona on Oct. 2. The figures come from a recap of the session by John Campbell of ROAST, one of the event’s community speakers. His recap lists a site move at one to three months in the typical case and six months to more than a year at the slowest. For core update recovery, it lists about three to six months as typical, and in the slowest cases, six months to a year. However, the recap doesn’t specify the sample size, time period, or what exactly is meant by ‘typical.’ When a client asks if a site move is still in progress or feels stuck, the ranges in the attendee recap can be a helpful reference, as they provide a way to compare progress, though keep in mind, they’re ranges rather than strict deadlines. If a move is still unresolved at three months, it tends to be at the high end of the usual range listed in the recap. Read our full coverage: Google Shows How Long Crawling, Indexing & Recovery Can Take Google has updated the filters in Search Console’s Performance report, making it easier to see combined Google Search traffic across multiple countries at once. Google Search Central announced the change on LinkedIn on Oct. 6. Search Console’s help page now says you can select multiple countries or devices to see their combined data. Its Compare option still shows two devices, countries, Search types, or Search appearances side by side, and the page says you can’t filter by multiple Search appearances. Teams that report on a group of markets can pull one combined Search figure for the group in the Performance report instead of comparing countries two at a time. Read our full coverage: Google Search Console Lets You Filter By Multiple Countries Google’s guidance on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content now warns against fabricated creator profiles. The new paragraph follows the page’s advice to add accurate authorship information, such as bylines. It names AI-generated headshots, made-up names, and false credentials when they’re used to make content appear as if it was written by human experts, and says any form of deception is “a signal of a low-quality page.” Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines already list deliberately misleading information about a site’s content creators as a type of deception. Bylines and author pages are where to check that a name, photo, or credential isn’t creating a false impression of human expertise, which Google’s guidance for site owners now calls deception. Read our full coverage: Google Adds Fake Author Warning To Helpful Content Guidance AI training crawlers usually don’t give sites a way to submit a sitemap, Google’s John Mueller said in the Oct. 1 episode of Google’s Search Off the Record podcast with Martin Splitt. He suggested a default name like sitemap.xml or an RSS feed for sites that want those crawlers to find their content, and said he has seen AI crawlers access his sitemap and RSS files in his own server logs. For valid sitemaps that show “Couldn’t fetch,” he gave two causes, host load and crawl demand, which he said is very often based on a site’s perceived quality. Search Console’s Sitemaps report help page also lists low crawl demand among the reasons a sitemap can’t be fetched. By Mueller’s account, a sitemap with an unusual name, no robots.txt entry, and a direct submission to Google is harder for other systems to find. AI training crawlers usually have no console to submit it to. For a valid sitemap stuck on “Couldn’t fetch,” both causes he described sit outside the file itself. Read our full coverage: Google’s Mueller Says AI Crawlers Access Sitemaps & RSS In His Logs and Google Explains The “Couldn’t Fetch” Sitemap Errors Each story this week highlights how labels or numbers can say less than they appear to. For example, a drop in rank tracker results in late September might reflect the way Google returned results to automated searches, according to SEOmonitor. The word “Typical” in the timing ranges is the recap’s label, without a specific definition, and “Couldn’t fetch” might refer to a sitemap that Google skipped or didn’t get a chance to fetch, rather than indicating a broken file, Mueller explained. Additionally, a Search Console country figure can now represent a combined total for several markets. Even a byline is a type of label, and Google’s current guidance considers a fabricated one to be deceptive if it’s used to make content appear as if written by human experts. This means that before including such labels in a client report, you should check what lies behind them. Add SEJ as a preferred source on Google Read Full Bio SEJ STAFF Matt G. Southern Senior News Writer at Search Engine Journal Follow on YouTube. Matt G. Southern is the Senior News Writer at Search Engine Journal, where he’s covered Google, SEO, ... Breaking news and insights to help you lead search strategies. Google’s Spam Update Now Reaches AI Answers. Enforcement Is Hard Google’s Generated Interfaces Could Compete With Tool Pages The Content Moat Is Dead. The Context Moat Is What Survives The AI Search & SEO News That Matters Breaking news and insights to help you lead search strategies. Breaking news and insights to help you lead search strategies. In a world ruled by algorithms, SEJ brings timely, relevant information for SEOs, marketers, and entrepreneurs to optimize and grow their businesses -- and careers.
Source: Search Engine Journal
This article has been carefully curated and reformatted for educational and informational purposes. Full credit goes to the original publisher.
📚 Visit more helpful articles on Joab Peters Blog
No comments