Back to Digital Marketing and SEO Blog
Newsletter
Edition 26: The Google Update That's Actually Good News
Google ran a spam cleanup last week, and for once that's a sentence most local businesses can read as good news. Inside: why this update clears junk competitors off your results instead of threatening you, which WordPress email plugin is handing live API keys to attackers right now, and a 15-minute check that tells you whether your own pages look spammy to Google. [Read the full edition →]
Epic Insights
Edition 26 · Jun 30, 2026
The Google Update That's Actually Good News | |
Four words that usually put a knot in a business owner's stomach: Google ran an update. So breathe. This one's different. For most of you, June's spam update is the kind that works for you, not on you. | |
The Big Story Google Just Cleared Out the Junk, and That's Good for YouBetween June 24 and 26, Google rolled out its June 2026 spam update. A spam update is a different animal from a core update. Google isn't rewriting how ranking works; it's aiming its spam-catching system, SpamBrain, at sites that were already breaking the rules and turning up the heat. The targets are the usual junk: pages mass-produced by AI to chase keywords, content scraped from other sites, cloaking, sneaky redirects, hidden text. The stuff that's been crowding you out of results you ought to own. It's a bit like the city finally clearing the knockoff-watch guys off your block. Nothing about your shop changed. The fakes just stopped hogging the sidewalk, and all of a sudden the real thing is easy to find. One 2026 wrinkle to keep in mind: back in May, Google expanded the same spam policy to cover gaming AI answers, the AI Overviews and AI Mode results. So the vendors selling "get quoted by AI" shortcuts are now playing a game Google has officially called spam. Lily Ray at Amsive has been tracking brands that scaled AI content hard, several now sitting at their lowest search visibility in five years. If you've been doing the real work, real pages for real customers, this update is on your side. No new rules to learn. The trash is just getting taken out. | |
| |
Your move: This week, search your main service and your city, then look at who's ranking now versus a month ago. If thin or copycat pages slipped while you held or climbed, the cleanup is working for you. Reply and we'll pull your before-and-after read. | |
Quick Hits The rest of the week, in bite-sized pieces | |
| |
| |
| |
| |
Ask Epic "Everybody's talking about this spam update, but we didn't see our rankings move at all. Did we dodge something, or are we supposed to be doing something now?"No news is good news here. Breathe easy. A spam update is Google going after the sites breaking its rules: the scaled junk content, the scraped pages, the sneaky tricks. If your rankings didn't budge, that's the system looking you over and finding nothing to flag. A clean bill of health, not a near miss. So no, there's nothing you need to scramble to do. But it's a fair moment for a quick gut-check, the same way a health inspector passing the restaurant next door makes you glance at your own kitchen. Is anything on your site there for Google instead of for customers? A pile of near-identical location pages, a "best in town" article that just names you first, blog posts clearly churned out to hit keywords. If the answer is no, you're right where you want to be. If you're not sure, that's a five-minute conversation we're glad to have. | |
What Epic's doing for you this week This week the team is reading the post-spam-update data so we can tell the real shifts from the noise, and we're patching the WordPress plugin flaws making the rounds right now, including the Gravity SMTP leak. We're also giving client content a fresh once-over for anything that could read as spammy to Google, even by accident, and pulling clean before-and-after numbers into your reporting. Anything that needs your eyes, you'll hear from us directly. Otherwise, your latest reports are waiting in your Client Center. | |
| |
Thanks for reading! Got questions? Ideas? I'm all ears. Share your thoughts with me and help shape future editions of Epic Insights. — Kristy Freeman | |
| |