Google's June Spam Update Is Brutal: The Sites Getting Wiped Out (And Why)

Edward: the SEO world is getting shaken by another Google spam update On this episode of the show We are breaking down Google's June 2026 spam update, which completed yesterday We're talking about winners, losers, what to watch out for, and as a bonus, the top parasite SEO platforms in June This is from Search Engine Roundtable The update only took about two days, and it is now done rolling out It started on Wednesday, June 24th, 2026, around noon, then completed on June 26 around 2:00 PM Eastern Time this update felt like it started earlier than it was announced and felt more widespread than a typical Google spam update All that Google said about this specific update was that it was a normal spam update. Google wrote, " This is a normal spam update, and it will roll out for all languages and locations." So Google didn't really share a lot, but let me tell you, the SEO community shared a ton An amazing post from Alex Groberman on X Huge ramifications for brands across e-commerce, SaaS, financial services, et cetera. A few days ago, I wrote that Google appeared to be rolling out an unannounced update. A lot of sites were seeing weird movement. some people were reporting 25% to 30% traffic drops. Some people were saying news sites were limping along, shops had slowed down, and traffic was becoming so unstable that it was hard to know what to do next. At the time, it was just an observation, but now Google has made it official. Google released the June 2026 spam update on June 24. It applies globally. It applies to all languages. Google is taking another swing at spam, and the timing is interesting. The May 2026 core update finished rolling out on June 2nd. Then we saw more unconfirmed volatility around June 19th. Now we have a confirmed spam update on June 24. So businesses are basically dealing with three weeks of Google volatility at the exact moment AI search is becoming more important. Google's own spam policies now explicitly mention attempts to manipulate generative AI responses in Google search. Basically, Google is policing traditional rankings and AI answer manipulation at the same time. The obvious losers are pretty easy to spot The losers: sites built around scaled AI content with no real value, scraped content, stitched together articles, expired domains repurposed for unrelated commercial topics, thin affiliate pages, pages made mostly to manipulate rankings, pages made mostly to manipulate AI answers, fake authority, fake expertise, fake mentions, and fake topical coverage. Basically, anything that exists because someone found a loophole and tried to scale it before Google caught up. In e-commerce, the sites most exposed are thin product pages, fake review pages, low-quality best product lists, outdated pricing pages, messy product feeds, and category pages with no real buying help. The sites in a better position, here we go, are the ones with original product information, useful category guides, current pricing, availability, shipping, returns, comparisons, customer proof, and clean product data. In finance, the risk is even higher because trust matters more. Generic finance explainers, affiliate lead gen pages, fake author profiles, outdated rate pages, thin calculator pages, and broad best credit card or best loan content with no real expertise are more exposed. The stronger sites have real credentials, current information, transparent methodology, calculators that actually help, clear service pages, original analysis, and authority outside their own website. In SaaS, I love this post so much. In SaaS, the obvious losers are generic comparison pages, AI-written alternatives posts, programmatic feature pages, copied G2-style roundups, fake integration pages, and broad B2B content that says nothing new. The better positioned SaaS companies have pricing pages, use case pages, comparison pages, implementation guides, product documentation, case studies, customer results, and original data. And product documentation is so important. You wanna have a lot of that out there. It really helps with AI. It helps with Google. It's so important. In education, I would be watching course aggregators, scholarship spam, .Doorway pages for every city or degree variation, generic career guides, and thin AI-written explainers The stronger sites are likely the ones with actual school authority, clear program information, admissions details, , outcomes data, faculty expertise, and helpful resources for real students. In local, the exposed sites are pretty obvious. Fake location pages, doorway city pages, review spam, inconsistent business information, thin service area pages, and local lead generation sites pretending to be real businesses. The stronger local businesses have real Google business profiles, reviews, local citations, useful service pages, local backlinks, clear contact information, and actual proof that they serve the area In publishing and affiliate, the sites in trouble are the ones built around rewriting what already ranks. Thin explainers, generic news summaries, no original reporting, no testing, no data, no real opinion, and no reason for Google or an AI system to trust the page The winners are the sites adding something new, reporting, analysis, experience, data, expert commentary, or genuinely useful research. So the category matters, but the pattern is mostly the same. Google is asking whether the page deserves to be used, trusted, cited, and shown inside a search experience that is becoming more AI-driven every month. The message boards are already showing the usual pattern. Some people are watching Search Console all day. Some are saying the back-to-back updates are frustrating because they were still trying to figure out what happened in May. Some are saying they have seen drastic fluctuations for at least two weeks. Some are asking whether the problem is rankings, impressions, clicks, discover, SERP layout, or AI answers. A traffic drop does not always mean one thing anymore, though. If impressions drop, Google may be showing your pages less often. If rankings drop, Google may have reassessed your pages. If clicks drop while rankings look stable, the search results page itself may have changed. AI overviews, more ads, more answer content, more forum results, more Google-owned surfaces, and more zero-click behavior can all reduce traffic even when a site still technically ranks. Such a great post from Alex Groberman. Then jumping over to Reddit, a user, Jamie Anton, said that this has been one of the worst SEO weeks he's had, period. He's in the HR and. B2B niche. He also has a horror blog B2B is very broad, but I always see a lot of volatility in HR and blogging. If he's doing Google Discover, he could get a lot of volatility with Google Discover on, on his horror blog We did a deep dive on Google Discover on yesterday's episode of the show. So good. Episode 1,088 of this podcast, Google Discover is the biggest traffic opportunity SEOs are missing, one billion clicks proven. If you didn't make it to the end of that episode My guest, Guillaume, shares revenue numbers. He shares making 52,000 euros in a day, over 500,000 euros in a month. It is a really awesome episode going deep if you're not familiar with how to get traffic from Google Discover Glenn Gabe shared some mega posts. He said, Health and medical site booms with the March 2026 core update, then drops with the May 2026 core update, then surges again with the mid-June volatility. Google has been active, very active He shares later on there's another hyper YMYL site that was surging after getting hit the past few updates He also said, "I ran the visibility reporting for nearly 2,000 sites that have been previously impacted by spam updates, plus a number of sites that are currently spamming for AI search. And man, it's crazy to see the volatility over the past few weeks." He shares screenshots and says, " The first screenshot shows another Mount AI sighting. The site surges before the May core update, but it was short-lived. Then it crashes down in June when many other sites saw volatility. Again, beware of scaling with risky tactics." If you don't know what Mount AI is, it's Publishing a ton of AI pages, you're publishing so much volume using AI, and you will get crazy ranking and traffic increases from Google. You'll go up and up and up and up. Google will catch a pattern, and then you will spike down, and your traffic charts look like a mountain. That's why it's called Mount AI, and you don't want it because it's very hard to recover from that He shares another screen - he shares another screenshot, says it's from Grokipedia, which is X's Wikipedia alternative that is made by AI. And I've done lots of episodes on Grokipedia episode 920 of the show, Google vs. Grokipedia, the AI encyclopedia that exploded from 19 clicks to 3.2 million clicks. Great episode Glen Gabe says Grokipedia has surged like crazy recently It got hit, but now it's almost back to where it was. I can't imagine this will continue, but it's up heavily now And then in the coupon space, I came across a powerhouse in coupons that got hammered by the May core update and now more with the June volatility. Huge drop showing across tools. spot checking the SERPs does show it's gone for many of those queries. The only good news for them is that Q4 is the most important time of the year, and they do have time to work on things So they got hit really bad with this update, but they have time to fix it Glen talks about the gambling niche, says that it has been crazy volatile with this update even more so than normal This is from Luck Forest on X. " Here's the short version. If you're building a normal site and not gaming the system, you're probably fine. Spam updates go after manipulation, not regular sites that have an off week." That's a great take But there are a few practices that are definitely fishy to Google, and you should be careful here. Cloaking, showing Google one version of a page and real visitors another. Sometimes people do this by accident with aggressive redirects or serving different content based on the user agent. If a human and Googlebot see different pages, that's cloaking even if you didn't mean it. Link spam. Buying links, mass link exchanges like I'll link to you and you link to me, or cheap we'll build you 5,000 backlink gigs on Fiverr. This kills thousands of sites every year as people are impatient. Ranking organically on Google may take years. That is not true. So better plan long term. It's incredibly easy for Google to understand backlink profiles. If your page is full of trash links or mutual link exchanges, you'll get flagged. I like that part, but I disagree that it takes years. It could take honestly weeks, it could take days, it could be super fast It could take a month or two, but definitely not years. If it's taking years, you did something wrong. It's not gonna take years. I once ranked above - I, I always share this story. I ranked above The New York Times in less than five minutes after publishing my page. Published my page, five minutes later, I was ranking number one above The New York Times for my target keyword So definitely not yours This poster says, "Being reckless with links is the easiest thing to F your page up. Google knows exactly which links are quality and which are spam." Keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is a big problem. I still see it all the time. People do it by accident. It is a big problem. Cramming the same keyword everywhere, listing 30 cities you serve, repeating phrases until the sentence stops sounding human. Old trick, still common, still penalized. If you read a paragraph out loud and it sounds unnatural, that's the tell. Huge tip is read your SEO pages out loud. Read all the writing on your site out loud. Read it out loud. It makes such a huge difference, I'm telling you. I do that for every single page on my site. For the company that I'm funding that's growing off my method of SEO, the operator who's doing SEO does that for everything that he writes. It's so important My editor for this podcast, when we put writing on the screen, he reads it all out loud. It's so, so, so important. Okay. We're almost onto the parasite SEO sites, but this post is finishing. Domain manipulation. Here's another thing that'll get you in trouble. Buying an expired domain that already has authority and slapping unrelated content on it to ride its old rankings The thing these four have in common is they all try to trick the system instead of just being useful. And during these updates, Google is separating pages that is made for people and made to rank. So if rankings drop this week or next, don't guess. Ask yourself if you're genuinely trying to be useful with your page or if you're just aiming to move up fast. And fair warning, recovery isn't instant. Even if you clean things up, Google systems can take months to reassess. So a quick fix today won't mean a quick bounce back next month. Gaming the system is tempting, but Google can kill your business overnight. And finally, we just went from play it really safe to talking about parasite SEO. Parasite SEO is black hat. It means using another site's high authority or priority in Google, like user-generated content, to rank high. It is black hat. It is against the rules. It is extremely easy, and people do it all the time. I'm not gonna say whether or not I have done it. It's super easy. People do it all the time So if you ever see a Reddit post with a keyword, like an obvious keyword in it, that's parasite SEO. And it's ranking on Google, that's parasite SEO. So here are the top best parasite SEO sites in June this year. This is from Charles Floate, friend of the podcast, legendary black hat. He's been on the show many times, and he'll be back many times. Charles is awesome. So the top parasite SEO sites in June: Reddit, Trustpilot, YouTube. YouTube is really crazy, the ease with which YouTube videos rank in Google and get cited by AI. YouTube, Facebook, press releases, PRWeb, Yahoo Fi-Finance, Access, Medium, GitHub, like docs and repos, Notion, select use cases, Substack, Quora, which is very niche dependent, Vocal Media, Yelp, Google Sites plus AWS sites, and PDF sites. And Charles says this works for traditional SEO, AI SEO, online reputation management, and a lot more. And you know what? Here's an example of using parasite SEO with LinkedIn, which LinkedIn is really good for parasite SEO as well, to rank and manipulate an AI overview. I shared this on Instagram and TikTok yesterday, and it's going viral.

Speaker 24: This guy wrote on LinkedIn, "Okay guys, just informing everyone I'm the world's most renowned AI visibility expert. Thank you for your attention to this matter." Then he shares that same day Google's AI Overview calling him the world's most renowned AI visibility expert, citing the LinkedIn post. What? Then doing more independent research to explain why he's the world's most renowned AI visibility expert. Here's what people don't realize. The most clicked sites in Google are user-generated content: YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, X. It is very common to use your keyword at the beginning of a social media post, then quickly see your post cited in an AI Overview or even ChatGPT. Then if you want these posts to stick around for longer, you build backlinks to them to say these posts are important. But it's just crazy that this works. Save years learning SEO that gets recommended by AI that specifically targets paying customers, users, warm leads calling you up at compactkeywords.com. Edward: That is everything for this episode of the podcast. This is episode 1089 of my daily search engine optimization show. If you want a method of doing SEO that is stable, stable with core updates, with spam updates, that's not against the rules, gets crazy, crazy results. It is about doing SEO that specifically targets people looking for what your brand offers right now. They are looking for what your brand offers, but they don't know that your brand exists. And so you make pages targeting these searchers and pages that are made to convert because these people already know what they want. They don't need you to explain what they want. … They need you to explain why your business is appropriate for what they're looking for. So you learn how to find the things that these people are searching, how to target them with pages that are meant to convert, how to structure your site for these pages, how to build links, how to do a technical audit. So much is in this. It's my SEO course, Compact Keywords. If you haven't checked it out yet, you are going to love it, compactkeywords.com. Hope you will take a look. That is everything for this episode of the show. If you watch this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening, and I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.