Rajan Patel, Vice President of Engineering for Google Search, has confirmed that the Google Search team remains well-equipped in its ongoing battle against search spam. They continue to refine their spam detection algorithms, including the recent August 2026 Google spam update, to reduce spam in search results.
Gagan Ghotra shared on X:
The August 2026 Spam Update clearly shows that the spam team is still active and developing new algorithms to address these issues.
Before this update, I suspected the search team might be understaffed—perhaps due to focusing more on the Gemini teams—and that this was allowing spammy tactics like scaled listicles to persist, rather than aggressively targeting them algorithmically. But after this update, it’s clear the spam team is still fully resourced and working hard!?
Rajan Patel responded briefly on X:
Yes, it is.
Here are those posts:
Recent data from SE Rankings indicates that this spam update had a more significant impact than most previous updates. Mordy Oberstein from SE Ranking commented that the update led to an 82% increase in URLs being removed from top search results, highlighting its aggressive nature. This change is seen as targeting spam rather than core algorithm issues.
Glenn Gabe has documented several examples of the updates’ effects. On his blog and social media, he shared instances of sites experiencing significant drops, often indicating heavily automated or programmatic spam tactics—sometimes involving millions of URLs.
A major drop for this site with the August spam update. It was scaled to 1.3 million URLs… appears to be heavily automated. pic.twitter.com/hVAWjrATLK
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) August 24, 2026
Another huge drop for a different site after the August spam update. I always advise companies not to be on the wrong side of these updates… and what’s happening behind the scenes is unsettling. They have nearly 250,000 URLs indexed, and the site is heavily affected. pic.twitter.com/vvSZUuyN2O
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) August 25, 2026
All signs point to Google confirming that its spam team is actively working hard on these issues. Discussions on the forum continue around the efforts and impacts of this latest update.