After a nail-biting 27 days for SEO technicians across the globe, Google’s August 2025 update has finished rolling out, according to Google Search Status Dashboard.
With the aim of penalising websites adopting spammy practices and decreasing the online visibility of low-quality content, this update has reportedly caused notable shifts in the organic traffic and search engine rankings of some websites.
If your site was affected, you’re probably asking just one question: “What can I do to recover?”
Let’s find out.
So, what's changed?
According to Search Engine Land, this latest update has had a substantial impact on many websites – with some site owners reporting a huge drop in traffic while others enjoyed a welcomed improvement in their search rankings.
In other words, the results are mixed and highly site-specific.
However, assessing the extent of the effect on your website isn’t as straightforward as in previous months.
Referencing tracking tool troubles, the num parameter being disabled, and a drop in Search Console impressions, Barry Schwartz, a technologist and a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land said:
“[I]f you saw any impact within the first week of the spam update, you were likely impacted. If not, it might just be weirdness from the tracking tools.”
Essentially, several competing factors have muddied the waters for many site owners as well as professional SEO technicians, making it harder to analyse the extent of the impact.
As Schwartz notes, tracking changes in the first week of the spam update, that’s August 26 through until September 2 2025, could be key to assessing whether your site has been affected.
What to do if there have been repercussions for your website
Whether you’ve seen a gut-wrenching drop in traffic, or even a slight drop in your search engine rankings, any negative impact on your site can be frustrating.
As part of its spam updates documentation, Google offers the following advice to site owners:
“Sites that see a change after a spam update should review our spam policies to ensure they’re complying with those. Sites that violate our policies may rank lower in results, or not appear in results at all.
“Making changes may help a site improve if our automated systems learn over a period of months that the site complies with our spam policies.
“In the case of a link spam update (an update that specifically deals with link spam), making changes might not generate an improvement.
“This is because when our systems remove the effects spammy links may have, any ranking benefit the links may have previously generated for your site is lost. Any potential ranking benefits generated by those links cannot be regained.”
Based on this guidance, the SEO experts at Aqueous Digital recommend the following best practices:
- Prioritise E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) for content creation
- Avoid purchasing or acquiring low-quality backlinks as they can harm site credibility
- Focus on earning high-quality, relevant backlinks through strategies like guest posting
- Steer clear of keyword stuffing that tries to manipulate searching rankings
- Avoid using AI tools for mass content generation with limited originality
- Never copy or scrape content from other websites
How did we get here?
Since 2021, Google has been consistently pushing out spam updates with the aim of tidying up Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
Essentially, that means identifying and decreasing visibility for low-quality content.
Google classes low-quality content as content that offers no or limited value to the user, is unoriginal or largely copied from other sources, poorly written, inaccurate or outdated, or uses manipulative techniques to gain unfair visibility.
2021
- June 2021 spam update: The first spam update, which was rolled out in just under 24 hours and reportedly decreased rankings for sites relying on low-quality links.
- June 2021 spam update: Just five days later, Google implemented another spam update.
- July 2021 spam update: This update lasted a mammoth 29 days until completion, but seems to have had less of an impact on websites than previous updates.
- November 2021 spam update: The November update took more than eight days to roll out and emphasises the importance of creating content with Google’s Search Essentials and E-A-T principles(Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) in mind.
2022
- October 2022 spam update: This update took just two days to complete and had a widespread global impact, affecting all languages.
- December 2022 link spam update: Taking 29 days to finish rolling out, this update leveraged the power of SpamBrain (the search engine’s spam-detection algorithm) to find and remove low-quality websites from SERPs.
2023
- October 2023 spam update: Almost a year later, this update took nearly two weeks to complete and focused on continuing earlier spam-detection measures across multiple languages.
2024
- March 2024 spam update: The March update took just over 14 days to roll out and penalised websites that utilised too much low-quality AI content.
- June 2024 spam update: A month later, another spam update followed taking seven days to complete which further enhanced the search spam detection capabilities.
- December 2024 spam update: At the end of 2024, a final spam update was released tackling harmful and spammy content which resulted in significant declines in traffic for many site owners.
2025
- August 2025 spam update: The latest release brings us up to date and has affected search results across the globe.
Dreading the next Google spam update?
Concerned about dwindling traffic every time a new spam update is announced?
With the team of expert digital marketers at Aqueous Digital on your side, your site can stay one step ahead of Google’s updates.
We don’t use manipulative techniques or ‘black hat’ SEO tricks to get your content ranking.
Instead, we’re dedicated to producing helpful, SEO-friendly content that adheres to Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines.
To learn more about how we can increase your online visibility, simply give our helpful and knowledgeable team a call today on 0800 285 1424.
Alternatively, we also welcome emails sent to hello@aqueous-digital.co.uk and online enquiries.
