Google completed the rollout of its August 2025 anti-spam update yesterday. The update lasted 27 days, from August 26, 2025 to September 22, 2025.
Google has completed its anti-spam update
The August 2025 Spam Update ended yesterday, as indicated on the Google Search Status Dashboard:
Find all the latest Google updates on our dedicated page.
Was I affected?
This end of the update coincides with the recent removal of the num=100 parameter. The problem? This change reduced impressions and raised the average position in Google Search Console. That makes it hard to use those metrics to determine whether you were affected.
KPIs to check to see if you were affected by the Spam Update:
- Average position within tools that account for the tracking change num=100 (e.g.: Monitorank, which has accounted for the change since early 2024).
- Average Top 10 position (which does not seem affected by the abandonment of num=100, Ahrefs having stated "rankings beyond the top 10 will show inconsistencies")
- Number of clicks (not affected by the abandonment of num=100).
In addition to these metrics, analyze your indexing : the reports Pages or Sitemaps in Search Console will give you an indication of deindexed pages.
Finally, use tools like SEObserver to observe large fluctuations on your SERP : have spammy-profile sites disappeared or dropped sharply? Did you drop sharply while others didn’t move?
You can also conduct an SEO audit to help you fix the issues.
When to measure?
Google generally recommends waiting 1 week: collect 7 days of data after the end of the update and compare that data to 7 days of data before the start of the update. In other words, compare the period from September 23 to 30, 2025 with the period from August 19 to 26, 2025. PS: take seasonality into account 
What does Google say?
If you think you were impacted, consult Google's spam policies, here's a recap.
What does an anti-spam update target?
An "anti-spam update" specifically targets spammy practices on websites, such as mass automatically generated content, low-quality or duplicate content, deceptive redirects, and other abuses aimed at manipulating rankings. It aims to clean search results of misleading or abusive content by improving Google's automated anti-spam systems.
You may not necessarily recover your rankings
Making changes can do not lead to improvement. Instead, read:
When our systems remove the effects that spammy links can have, any ranking benefit those links once gave your site is lost. The potential ranking benefits generated by those links cannot be recovered.
Main forms of spam targeted during a Spam Update
- Cloaking (different content shown to search engines and users) & hidden text and links (text or links not visible to users but visible to crawlers).
- Satellite pages (pages or sites outside the structure, created solely to rank – increasingly rare in 2025)
- Abusive use of expired domains (using the authority of an old domain name to publish content with no added value)
- Excessive keyword usage (filling a page with keywords in an unnatural way)
- Toxic links and abusive link-building practices (we'll let you judge for yourself the toxicity of your links; if you know, you know).
- Abusive large-scale use of content (non-original content via AI or scraping)
And of course: hacked content, malicious practices, parasitic SEO, deceptive redirects, or affiliate programs with no added value.
Resources to understand Updates
The article "SEO: Google has completed its Anti-Spam Update (August 2025 Spam Update)" was published on the site Abondance.
