A trade directory we run was getting about 1,000 search impressions a day through September 25, 2026. Two days later it was getting about 25. Nothing was hacked and nobody attacked it. Google ran a spam update, and the things it went looking for were things we had built.
This desk reports what marketers do to websites. This time the marketers were us.
The Short Version
- Impressions fell about 96 percent between September 25 and September 27. Google's spam update ran from September 24 to October 8.
- The pages stayed indexed and there was no manual action. That pairing is how a demotion looks.
- Three things we built likely caused it. Thousands of listings shared one paragraph, every listing wore a badge we awarded ourselves, and our rating markup used review counts taken from Google.
- Five weeks in, before we knew the cause, we published 7,471 more pages of the same kind.
- We have reversed all of it. We cannot show a recovery yet.
What Happened
The drop was a cliff, not a slope. One search for a common service term slid from position 15 to position 84. Even searches for exact names, the easiest ones to win, stopped showing it.
A second directory of ours lost about 60 percent of its impressions starting October 1. Two other sites in the same network went up over the same weeks. So it was not the whole network.
Google's own status dashboard lists the September 2026 spam update as starting on September 24 and finishing on October 8. Our cliff sits three days inside that window.
Daily Search Impressions, Before And After
Source, Search Console for the directory. Rounded.
How We Ruled Out Everything Else
| What It Could Have Been | What We Checked | What We Found |
|---|---|---|
| A manual action | The Manual Actions report in Search Console | None |
| Pages dropped from the index | The page indexing report, week by week | About 2,270 pages indexed before and after. Flat |
| A bad release | Our own release log | The last large release before the drop was the badge launch on September 22 |
| A problem with the whole network | Sister sites built the same way | Two of them grew over the same weeks |
Indexed and invisible is the signature. A site that loses its pages has a crawling or quality problem. A site that keeps its pages and loses even the exact name searches has been judged.
What We Had Built Wrong
One Paragraph, 9,814 Times
The directory held 9,814 business listings. Most of them carried the same template paragraph with the name and city swapped in. Google's spam policies call large amounts of pages with little value for readers scaled content abuse. We had built a textbook case.
A Badge We Gave Ourselves
On September 22, two days before the update began, we shipped a badge on every listing that said the business was certified. We had certified nobody. Each badge came with embed code that linked back to us with a followed link. That is a self made award handing out links to its own maker.
Stars That Were Not Ours
Our structured data told Google that each listing had a rating and a review count. The numbers came from the business's Google profile, not from reviews left on our site. Google's review snippet rules say ratings in markup must come from your own users and must not be gathered from other websites.
Then We Made It Worse
On October 31, still thinking the badges were a growth feature, we published 7,471 badge check pages and put them in the sitemap. We found the real cause the same day and pulled them.
How To Spot It On Your Own Site
- Impressions fall by most of their value in one or two days, not over weeks.
- The date sits inside an update window on Google's Search Status Dashboard.
- The count of indexed pages does not move.
- The Manual Actions report is empty.
- Searches for exact names that you used to win no longer show your site.
What To Do About It
- Stop publishing. Do not add pages until you know the cause. We did, and added 7,471 reasons to distrust us.
- List what you built in the 30 days before the drop. Our badge release was two days before the update. It was the first thing we should have looked at and the last thing we did.
- Take thin pages out of the index. We set 1,680 listings with no phone, hours, rating or owner content to noindex. Google documents how noindex works.
- Remove markup you cannot back. Rating markup now comes only from reviews collected on the site itself.
- Make self made badges honest. Awards now go only to the six listings whose owners claimed them. Embed links are nofollow by default.
- Add something only you have. We added facts taken from each business's own website to 1,843 listings.
- Wait, and measure. Google says changes may help over a period of months, once its systems learn the site complies.
What We Got Wrong
All of the above, and the order we worked in. We spent five weeks watching the numbers before anyone lined up the drop against our own release log.
We also read the badge as a growth feature. Whether a thing helps us grow and whether a search engine reads it as manipulation are two different questions. We only asked the first one.
As of this report the impressions have not come back in any way we can show. We will update this page with the numbers when they move, in either direction.
Sources
- Search Console performance, page indexing and manual action reports for the directory, read October 22 and October 31, 2026, and our own release log.
- Google Search Status Dashboard, September 2026 spam update.
- Google Search Central, Spam policies for Google web search, the sections on scaled content abuse and link spam.
- Google Search Central, Review snippet structured data and Google Search spam updates.