Brace Yourself (Again): Google’s June Spam Update Is Rolling Out

Just when you thought your website traffic had stabilized after the big shake-up of the May 2026 Google Core Update, comes a new update. Google left us a love note today that they are launching a June Spam update starting June 24. It may take a few days to complete; the last spam update was done in record time, but previous ones took about a week to finish, so traffic may be volatile once again.

A few things to note:

• Wait to check your Google Search Console data until the rollout is complete. I like to wait a few days after that before taking any action, too. Data can bounce around a lot during and after a Google update, whether it’s a Core or Spam update, and you may get a false reading if you peek at the data too soon.

• Google hasn’t announced any major policy changes, so this seems to be more of a tweak to their spam-detection algorithm than anything else.

• If, after a few weeks, you don’t see any further shifts, and you want to update anything that seems to have been hit by the update, go ahead.

Was your site hit hard by the May 2026 Core Update? One of my sites did well, all things considered, and another got whacked by the Invisible Hand of Google.

An analysis of site data bears out what my gut instincts told me when I first saw the shift in SERPs patterns: the last update took away most of what was left of my TOFU (top of funnel, or simple question-answer) content by actually de-indexing it. Many of my “What is”- type blog posts were crawled but not indexed, which effectively makes them invisible.

I spent years building up this kind of content because, before the age of AI, this is what you did – you filled the top of the funnel with broad content to attract the most clicks. Much of this content is actually better than glossary-type articles (those are also an old SEO TOFU trick, but tend to be really short, quick posts).

I’ve been steadily dipping back into these old standbys, dusting them off, updating stats and titles, fleshing them out for deeper coverage, and resubmitting them for indexing. Google’s been slow to reindex, but it’s early days yet.

If your site got hit by the May core update and you lost visibility and rankings, here’s what you can do:

• Retire really old posts that aren’t serving your messaging anymore

• Combine short, simple TOFU posts into long-form articles and publish them as fresh content

• Update old posts and resubmit them through Search Console for re-indexing

SEO isn’t for the impatient or faint of heart. It’s a long game; you’ll spend months or (like me) years building something until it takes off. But you do need it in this digital age to help people find your website. Keep working at it. Be like the tortoise in the Aesop’s fable, The Tortoise and the Hare: repeat to yourself, “Slow and steady wins the race!”