Google Spam Update in June 2024: Was Your Site Hit?

Traffic started sliding on or after June 20, 2024? Then yes, the Google spam update might be behind it. Might. The date on its own proves nothing until you’ve ruled out everything else. Google kicked off the June 2024 spam update on June 20, 2024, according to its Search Status Dashboard. Below is what to check, and in what order, before you touch anything on the site.

What is a Google spam update?

Google’s spam detection runs all the time, quietly, in the background. A spam update is the moment those automated systems get a notable improvement. One of them is SpamBrain, an AI-based spam-prevention system that gets improved from time to time so it spots abuse more accurately and catches new types of it. As Google’s documentation on spam updates explains, sites that violate the spam policies may rank lower or not appear in results at all. And no human looks at your pages at any point in that process.

How to tell whether the June 2024 spam update caused your drop

Take the day your decline began and put it next to the start date on the Search Status Dashboard. Do they match? Fine, the update is now a suspect. Not a verdict. Work through the checks below, in sequence.

1. Confirm the date. Open the performance report in Search Console and find the first day clicks and impressions turned down.
2. Measure the scope. Is the fall sitewide, or limited to one section, template or language version?
3. Identify the losers. List the queries and pages that lost visibility and look for a shared trait.
4. Rule out technical faults on your own origin. Server errors, blocked crawling and an accidental noindex produce very similar charts.
5. Exclude seasonality and tracking problems. Compare with the same weeks a year earlier and verify that your analytics tag still fires.

A slide that started before June 20 points elsewhere. So does one that only shows up in analytics while Search Console data stays flat (that one is usually a tracking issue, not a ranking one).

Algorithmic penalty vs manual action: which one are you dealing with?

Two different animals. A spam update is applied by automated systems and leaves no message. A manual action is issued by a human reviewer and reported in Search Console. So check the Manual Actions report first, because an empty one means the change is algorithmic. The responses differ too. A reviewer’s decision can be answered with a reconsideration request once the issue is fixed, which is how manual actions for unnatural links are resolved. For an automated demotion no such request exists. The only route is to bring the site into compliance and wait for the systems to reassess it.

What to review against Google’s spam policies

Google’s own advice: sites seeing a change after a spam update should review the spam policies and make sure they comply. In practice that means auditing what you do, not chasing individual rankings. I’d start with these areas:

• content produced at scale that offers little value to the reader,
• link schemes, including purchased placements without proper qualification,
• excessive link exchanges between related or partner sites,
• hidden text and redirects that send visitors somewhere other than promised,
• user-generated spam left unmoderated in comments, forums or profiles.

Swapping links with partners is not automatically a violation, so get clear on when reciprocal linking becomes spam before you rip anything out. Sponsored placements are a separate matter, and qualifying paid links with the right attribute is usually the fix. Whatever you find, correct the violation itself. Trying to hide a site network, expired domains or mass-produced pages from Google? That fixes nothing and adds a further breach on top.

Link spam: why some lost rankings do not come back

This is the part nobody likes to hear. When Google’s systems remove the effects of spammy links, any ranking benefit those links generated is lost and cannot be regained. Google states this about a link spam update specifically, meaning one that deals with link spam, and adds that making changes in that case might not generate an improvement. Uncomfortable, honestly. Cleaning up a link profile removes risk, but it does not restore the old positions, because those were propped up by signals that no longer count. Your new baseline has to be rebuilt on earned mentions and useful content.

Spam update recovery: what to do and what to leave alone

Making changes may help a site improve if Google’s automated systems learn over a period of months that it complies with the spam policies. Read that wording again. No date, no promised outcome. So plan for patience and careful record keeping.

Start by documenting what you found. Then fix only confirmed policy violations and keep a change log with dates, so later movements in the data can be traced to a specific edit. What to leave alone? Mass deleting content, disavowing links in panic, and launching a redesign or migration while the cause is still unknown. Each of those moves adds a new variable and makes the original problem harder to isolate.

Order beats speed here: confirm the date, measure the scope, exclude technical and tracking faults, read the Manual Actions report, and only then audit the site against the policies. And if every step still points to the Google spam update, fix what breaks the rules and give the systems time to notice.

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