August 2025 Spam Update
A lengthy spam update — roughly four weeks — enforcing Google's spam policies across search results.
Spam update
Aug 26, 2025
Sep 21, 2025
26 days
Overview
What the August 2025 Spam Update did
The August 2025 Spam Update was an unusually long spam rollout, taking about four weeks to complete globally. Spam updates use automated systems like SpamBrain to identify and neutralise content and links that violate Google's spam policies — scaled content abuse, expired-domain abuse, cloaking and unnatural links — rather than re-judging overall quality. The extended timeline meant impact built gradually across the rollout window.
Key points
What changed
- Policy enforcement against scaled content abuse, expired-domain abuse and link spam.
- Long ~26-day rollout, so effects appeared gradually.
- No change to how 'quality' is assessed — this targeted violations.
What to do about it
How to respond
- 1
Audit for any tactics that breach Google's spam policies and remove them.
- 2
Disavow or clean up clearly unnatural inbound links if relevant.
- 3
Recovery from spam updates is slow — fix the cause and wait for reprocessing.
Sources
Where this is confirmed
Did the August 2025 Spam Update move your rankings?
Indexly tracks SERP volatility, ranking shifts and traffic impact for every Google core and spam update — so you can see exactly which pages this rollout touched.