I run a bit over ten websites. During Google's September 2026 spam update, which started on September 24, one of them basically disappeared from search. Search impressions went from a few hundred a day to almost nothing on October 3.
I'm writing this up with the Search Console screens and the numbers I have, partly to keep a record and partly because I would really like to hear from anyone who's been through something similar or has a guess about what's going on. I am leaving the site's name out.
What happened
It is the marketing site for a B2B SaaS product. Here's the Performance report for the last three months, daily:
Daily impressions on the article pages:
- Sept 7 to Sept 10: a big spike right after the first posts went live. Peak was 740 impressions on Sept 9, across 159 articles
- Sept 11 to Sept 12: dropped about 80%, then came back within roughly ten days
- Sept 23 to Oct 2: back up to around 480 a day, with up to 171 articles getting impressions
- From Oct 3: about 10 a day
For the whole site (home, pricing, comparison pages and articles), it went from 364 impressions a day (Sept 20 to Oct 2) to 12 a day (Oct 4 to Oct 7). Every page type dropped on the same day, not just the blog.
Google's status dashboard lists the September 2026 spam update as starting Sept 24 and taking 13 days and 16 hours to roll out, so Oct 3 falls inside that window.
The site
- Domain registered: Aug 28, 2026
- First articles: Sept 2 (Japanese), Sept 16 (English)
- Articles: 471 in Japanese, 249 in English, 720 in total, about 20 a day
- How topics were picked: up to Sept 21 I did not check search volume for the target keyword or look at what was already ranking. After that, every article had to pass a volume check (Google Ads Keyword Planner) and a look at the current top results before going out
- Other pages: home, features, pricing, comparisons with competitors
Indexing
As of Oct 4, 701 pages were indexed and 442 weren't.
Here's why the 442 are not indexed:
The biggest bucket is "Discovered - currently not indexed" at 147. I ran URL Inspection on them and none had ever been crawled.
What's interesting is that the paginated blog index pages (page 2, 3, 5, 10, 20, 30) were all crawled and indexed. So Google is seeing the links to those articles, it is just not bothering to fetch them.
Things I checked that look fine
- Manual actions: none
- Security issues: none
- robots.txt, canonicals, noindex, redirects: unchanged and doing what they should
- No code changes on the site around the drop
- Searching for the product name still brings the site up. What dropped is everything else
- Organic visits in Google Analytics fell to 0 to 3 a day on the same day, so it's not a reporting glitch
Backlinks
The site had 52 referring domains. 40 of them came from the syndication of a single English press release (mostly US local news sites).
What I've done so far
- Oct 9: noindexed 132 articles whose target keyword had zero monthly searches (checked one by one in Keyword Planner)
- Oct 9: added category index pages and changed related posts to the neighbors in the same category. Max clicks from the home page to any article went from 7 to 6
- Since Oct 9: stopped publishing new articles
- No mass rewrites. The plan is to wait and watch until around Oct 23
Comparing with an older site's first months
I also run a site that's been around for many years, and I added a blog to it in March 2026. Its first months looked like this:
- First four weeks or so: impressions grew steadily, about 5 to 6 a day per article
- Next four weeks or so: more articles were getting impressions, but total impressions flatlined. Per article it dropped to around 4
- Then per-article impressions recovered and it started growing. The clear upturn in Google came about two and a half months in
From Sept 23, this site was in that same "more articles showing, fewer impressions each" phase (4.7 per article down to 2.9). The difference is the older site got through it in about six weeks, while this one sank after about ten days. The older site sits on a domain with a long history. This one is a month old.
What I'd love to hear
- The paginated blog index pages get crawled, but the articles they link to have never been fetched. How should I read that?
- On Sept 11 the site also dropped about 80% and came back in around ten days. This time the drop is deeper (around 97%) and it lines up with the spam update window. Is it likely to come back the same way? If you've had a whole site sink in a spam update and recover, how long did it take?
- Besides noindexing the zero-volume articles, is there anything I should be doing now? Anything I should definitely not do?
- Could a batch of links from one press release's syndication have played a part?
If there's a number or a screen that would help, let me know and I'll add what I can.
Top comments (0)