Rajan Patel, VP of Engineering for Google Search, has confirmed that the Google Search team is still well-resourced in its fight against search spam. The spam team continues to update its spam algorithms, such as the latest Google August 2026 spam update, to help reduce spam in Google Search results.
Gagan Ghotra posted on X saying:
August 2026 Spam Update just showed one thing .... spam team is still alive and writing new algorithms to tackle things!Pre this update, I was like may be search team is not well staffed anymore (Google more focus on Gemini teams) and that's why they are letting rank some of these spam things like scaled listicles and not like algorithmic hammering those domains at scale but after this update, it seems like spam team is still well resource actually!!??
Rajan Patel from Google responded on X in short:
Yes it is.
Here are those posts:
The latest data from SE Rankings showed that this past spam update hit harder than most spam updates. Mordy Oberstein from SE Ranking wrote on X, "This, to me, sums up the recent Google spam update the best.... the 82% increase in Google kicking URLs out of the top 100. (Because this is a spam, not a core update)."
Glenn Gabe documented many hits on his blog and also on X:
Big drop for this site with the August spam update. Scaled to 1.3M urls... Looks heavily programmatic. pic.twitter.com/hVAWjrATLK
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) August 24, 2026
Another huge drop for a site based on the August spam update. I always tell companies you don't want to be on the wrong side of a spam update... And I don't even want to get into what they are doing. It's terrible. I can tell you they have close to 250K urls indexed, though.… pic.twitter.com/vvSZUuyN2O
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) August 25, 2026
So there you go, Google agrees its spam team is working hard.
Forum discussion at X.
