Google spam policies
Google's documented list of behaviours that can cause lower rankings or removal, covering cloaking, doorways, hacked content, keyword…
AlgorithmsSpam update
Spam updates
Announced improvements to Google's automated spam detection, distinct from core updates, targeting violations of the spam policies.
In full
Spam updates are typically shorter than core updates and their effects are sharper: sites in violation lose visibility abruptly. Google lists them separately from core updates and from link spam updates on its ranking updates page. Recovery requires fixing the underlying violation, and even then can take months because detection is periodic and confidence-based.
Example
A network of sites reusing expired domains for unrelated commercial content loses visibility within days of a spam update rollout.
Related terms
SpamBrain
Google's AI-based spam prevention system, used to detect spam at crawl and ranking time and to identify and neutralise unnatural links.
Core update
A significant, broad change to Google's ranking systems, announced in advance and rolled out over one to several weeks, typically a few…
Expired domain abuse
Buying an expired domain and repurposing it to host unrelated low-value content in order to inherit its accumulated ranking signals.
Scaled content abuse
Generating many pages primarily to manipulate rankings rather than help users, whether by AI, templates, scraping, or stitching content…