Google rolled out its spam update on 18 August 2026, announced only through the Search Status Dashboard. It applies to all languages and all regions, Belgium included, and the rollout was expected to take "a few days". If your organic traffic has been moving unusually since that date, it is probably not a coincidence.
This is the third spam update of 2026, against a single one in the whole of 2025. March's rolled out in roughly 19.5 hours, June's in two days. Google published no new policy alongside it: the update refreshes the existing classifiers, it does not change the criteria.
For a Belgian SME, the point is not to understand the algorithm, but to know within an hour whether your site carries one of the patterns Google penalises, often without you ever looking for it: pages generated in bulk, links bought by a previous provider, an old blog left unattended. The penalty is slow to undo: Google states that recovery can take months, the time its systems need to see that the site complies again.
Google states it plainly: recovery can take months, not days.
What a spam update actually targets
It is not a quality update
The two are often confused, and the nuance matters. A core update reassesses the relevance and quality of pages: your content stays legitimate, it is simply judged less useful than another. A spam update enforces a rulebook: it identifies practices listed in Google's spam policies and removes the benefit they were producing.
In practice, after a core update you improve the content; after a spam update, you remove or repair whatever breaks a rule, then you wait. Google relies on SpamBrain, its automated detection, backed by manual actions when a human reviewer steps in.
The sixteen practices Google lists
Google's spam policies cover sixteen categories. Few of them genuinely concern an SME:
Scaled content abuse: mass producing pages with little added value, whatever the method used to generate them.
Link spam: buying or selling links, or multiplying exchanges for the sole purpose of influencing rankings.
Site reputation abuse: hosting third party content (sponsored pages, rented sections) to exploit the authority of your domain name.
Doorway pages: rolling out the same page in dozens of city by city variants, with no content of its own.
Hidden text and keyword stuffing: the old recipes, still present in sites carried over as is during a rebuild.
The rest (expired domains, hacked content, sneaky redirects) belongs to security, not to a practice anyone adopts by accident.
The real risk for an SME: content produced in bulk
The bar is not "written by an AI"
This is the costliest misunderstanding. Google does not penalise the use of AI, it penalises the mass production of pages without added value.
An Ahrefs study of 900,000 web pages published in April 2025 shows that 74.2 % of new pages contain AI generated content, of which only 2.5 % are purely generated and 25.8 % purely human: the vast majority is a mix. A companion Ahrefs survey of 879 content leaders indicates that 87 % of them use AI to produce their content.
If Google penalised AI assisted content, it would empty its own results. What it targets is the page manufactured to occupy a query, with no real experience and no data of its own: a boundary we set out in our article on what Google tolerates and what it penalises in AI content.
The three scenarios we see most often with clients
The city pages. Thirty pages reading "Plumber in Wavre", "Plumber in Waterloo", "Plumber in Nivelles", identical bar a name: the textbook doorway page. A single service area page, with real references per municipality, performs better and risks nothing.
The blog filled by the kilo. Forty articles published in three weeks by a provider paid by volume, none of which answers a real client question. That is scaled content abuse, even if each text is fine taken on its own.
The link pack. An "SEO boost" bought for 300 euros for a hundred backlinks. When Google neutralises those links, the benefit disappears: the position gained falls back, and it does not climb again by itself.
How to tell whether your site is affected
The thirty minute check
Everything happens in Search Console, free of charge.
Manual actions: open the dedicated report. If it is empty, no human reviewer has penalised your site. The fastest check, and the most reassuring.
Comparing periods: the seven days from 18 August 2026 against the seven before, then against the same week last year to neutralise the holiday effect. Look at clicks, not average positions.
By page and by query: a diffuse drop looks like a seasonal shift. A drop concentrated on a precise group of pages, with positions collapsing at once, looks like a penalty.
Indexed pages: a sharp fall is a strong signal.
Beware the most common false positive: traffic falling without any loss of position, caused by answers displayed directly in the results. A structural phenomenon, different from a penalty, documented in our article on zero-click and falling traffic at equal positions.
If the diagnosis is positive
The useful reflex is the opposite of the natural one: you do not publish three more articles to compensate. You identify the pattern, you remove it, you document it. In concrete terms: unpublish or merge the pages produced in series, get the bought links removed, take down the third party sections hosted on your domain, then file a reconsideration request if a manual action is involved. Without a manual action there is nothing to request: the automated systems reassess the site on their own, and that is where the several months Google announces come into play.
The Belgian context: an inherited risk more than a chosen one
According to the FPS Economy (2020-2021 survey), 95 % of medium sized companies (50 to 249 people) have a website, against 63 % of micro companies (2 to 9 people). The structural gap has not moved: the smaller the company, the less internal skill there is to watch over what has been put online, and the more the site depends on a provider who left long ago.
That is where the real risk sits. The vast majority of penalised Belgian SMEs are not caught for deliberate manipulation, but for an inheritance: a link pack bought in 2019, an automated blog installed by a low cost agency, a "partners" section opened up to sponsored articles.
A second local specificity: multilingualism. A FR/NL site duplicated mechanically, with raw machine translation and zero content of its own per language, ticks several boxes at once.
Frequently asked questions
My traffic has dropped since 18 August, am I penalised?
Not necessarily: in late August a seasonal drop is normal in Belgium. Compare first with the same week last year. A penalty is recognised by its shape: a sharp drop, concentrated on certain pages, positions diving, not a general softening.
Am I at risk if my texts are written with ChatGPT?
No, not in itself: Google judges the result, not the tool. An AI assisted article, reread and enriched with your experience and verifiable data, poses no problem at all. A series of pages produced to cover keywords, with nothing original, does, whether written by a machine or a human.
How long does recovery take after a penalty?
Google talks in months, not days: its systems have to see over time that the site complies. With a manual action, a reconsideration request speeds things up, but only after an effective fix. There is no guarantee of a return to previous positions: once spam links are neutralised, the gain they produced is lost for good.
Should I disavow links I never asked for?
In most cases, no: Google ignores the vast majority of poor quality links by itself. The disavow tool is reserved for links you or a provider bought or exchanged, and above all for a manual action. Used blindly, it does more harm than good.
Priority action plan
Check manual actions: Search Console, "Manual actions" report. Empty = no human penalty. Two minutes.
Compare periods: clicks from 18 to 25 August 2026 against the seven previous days, then against the same week in 2025. Isolate the pages that drop.
Audit the inheritance: list the pages published in series, the third party sections and the link campaigns paid for in the past. Dig out the SEO invoices of the last five years.
Clean up before you produce: unpublish or merge the pages with no value of their own and remove the rented sections, before writing a single line of new content.
Put a quarterly check in place: at a rate of three spam updates a year, a regular SEO review costs less than a recovery that takes six months.
The underlying message is not new, but it keeps getting sharper: volume protects nothing any more. An SME site publishing six useful pages a year, anchored in its trade and its local market, is sturdier than a site with three hundred generic pages. That sturdiness is built once and maintained cheaply. Repairing it after the fact takes months.
Unsure what is lurking in your site's history? We handle the audit and the clean up for Belgian SMEs: search engine optimisation.
Visibility
August 22, 2026
8 min read
