Has anyone noticed ranking changes after Google’s September 2026 Spam Update?

Curious to hear what people are seeing. Especially with backlinks, expired domains, PBNs or scaled content.

Did your sites gain, drop or stay stable?

Curious to hearr guys !!!

My site is in a competitive niche, and use quite a few PBNs and expired domains. Panicked when Wincher and Ahrefs showed a massive drop from Sep24. A lot of my keywords that were ranking #1 or #2 suddenly showed "position lost" or "no page in the top 30". But after checking manually and using isearchfrom, most of my rankings haven't really changed—maybe just a slight dip slightly outside the normal fluctuation range.

These third-party rank tracking tools suck, they shouldn't shamelessly charge such high subscription fees.

I’d be more interested in comparing the update with the previous few weeks rather than judging it from a couple of days. If several sites in the same niche moved at the same time, that would make the update look more convincing.

WickednDivine said:

Curious to hear what people are seeing. Especially with backlinks, expired domains, PBNs or scaled content.

Did your sites gain, drop or stay stable?

Curious to hearr guys !!!

Click to expand...

from what i've seen, it’s been pretty mixed so far. Some sites dropped, while others barely stable, so I wouldn’t pin it on backlinks alone just yet. Still watching things settle before draw any conclu.

A lot of sites with thin scaled content or sketchy backlinks (expired domains, PBNs) took a hit after the September 2026 spam update.

Clean, useful sites mostly stayed stable or even gained as weaker competitors dropped.

stable on my side. i build with gsa but slow, 100 to 300 verified a day, and never at the money site. the links go at my buffer sites and the money site only gets links from those. nothing moved in september. the one site i know that dropped had the automated links pointed straight at it