Two weeks after the June spam update: did any of your link sources actually get hit?

Sanity check on the June spam update, now the dust has had two weeks to settle.

The rollout ran June 24 to June 26. Two days start to finish, and Google's only comment was that it was "a normal spam update", all languages and locations. Trackers read it as a bit bigger than the March one.

Usually a spam update leaves visible bodies in the link market: sellers going quiet, refund threads, guest post farms deindexed overnight. This time my feed has been strangely quiet. So I pulled the analytics on the network I watch (a few hundred live sites) for the two weeks either side of the rollout. Median site: 0.98x, dead flat. Exactly one site flatlined to zero. Roughly 1 in 10 lost half their traffic, but at typical network-site traffic levels that bucket is mostly noise, and about as many sites went UP by the same margin. Nothing that reads as a systematic hit.

So, people who actually buy or sell links here:

• Did any source you use get deindexed or flattened since June 26?
• Any category hit harder than the rest -> guest post marketplaces, PBNs, niche edits?
• Or did this one aim somewhere else entirely (scaled content, expired domain abuse, parasites)?

Trying to figure out if this was a link event or a nothingburger for links.

the most useful checks would be to correlate per-site changes in gsc spam manual action issues if any and compare impressions vs clicks rank shifts vs indexing quirks and look for distribution changes

QuarkLinks said:

correlate per-site changes in gsc spam manual action

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Did that sweep before I posted, should have put it in the OP. Manual actions across the few hundred properties I can see: zero. Not one. Impressions vs clicks both flat through the rollout window, and the only distribution change was the usual weekend dip.

One trap if you run those checks yourself: GSC's indexing report spent about three weeks frozen and only came back around July 5. When it backfilled, plenty of indexed counts stepped down in one visible cliff. If your count looks like it fell off a ledge mid-June, check whether you're looking at the backfill artifact before you blame the spam update.

And for the buyers in here, you can't see GSC on a source you don't own, so the 3-minute version: site: the exact URLs your links sit on (the pages, not the homepage), search the seller's brand name and see if their own site still holds #1 for it, and pull the domain's keyword-count trend in whatever tool you have. A deindexed source fails the first two instantly. A source that passes all three but lost some traffic is usually looking at seasonality, not a penalty.

Still zero confirmed casualties in here, which after two weeks is starting to look like the answer. Bodies welcome if anyone has one.

Similar story on my end - nothing that looks like a targeted hit, just normal week-to-week fluctuation. Good callout on the GSC indexing backfill though, that's an easy thing to misread as a penalty when it's really just a reporting artifact.

seotrends said:

nothing that looks like a targeted hit

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Appreciate the datapoint. That's two flat datasets now and zero manual actions between them.

So the question flips: if links weren't the target, what filled a two-day global rollout? The other usual suspects are scaled AI content, expired domain abuse and parasites. If anyone runs in those lanes, did June 26 leave a mark? Ruling it out one lane at a time beats guessing, and this thread has already put the "links got hit" theory in the ground.

Two updates since the weekend, closing one loop and opening another.

First, the line I missed in the original coverage: Google actually went on record that this one did not target link spam or site reputation abuse at all. Search Engine Land and Seroundtable both carried it. So the quiet feed wasn't luck -> links were never on the menu. Officially a nothingburger for links, which matches every dataset posted in here.

Second, the trackers never really settled after the rollout, and Seroundtable logged another blip around July 11. Unconfirmed, Google silent, the usual. So if a source of yours moved this weekend, don't pin it on the June update, that ship sailed on the 26th. Different animal, possibly an unconfirmed refresh or more AI-surface testing.

Which re-opens the question with a cleaner frame: anyone's sources move in the last 72 hours? Same three checks as my post above. Flat through June 26 + movement after July 11 would be the first genuinely interesting body in this thread.

me too honestly.i have not come across any thing that could be classified as targeted attack on anyone only the regular updates done on a weekly basis. nice observation on GSC indexing as it is very easy to confuse that for an actual penalty.