June 2024 spam update

Why a quiet update is a diagnostic trap

When an update is confirmed, every drop in that fortnight gets blamed on it. When the update introduced nothing new, that reasoning fails: the systems applied the same standards they had been applying since March. A site that was compliant in May was compliant in June unless something on the site changed.

So the more useful question for a June 2024 drop is not whether the update ran, but whether your site engages any published spam policy at all. If it does not, the cause is almost certainly elsewhere.

The policies being enforced at this point

The three policies introduced in March 2024 were live and being applied: scaled content abuse, expired domain abuse, and site reputation abuse, the last of which had begun enforcement on 5 May 2024. June was the first spam update to run with site reputation abuse fully in effect.

That timing matters for publishers who hosted third-party coupon, casino or loan sections. Some had unwound those arrangements in the two-month window Google gave; some had not.

If nothing on your site breaks a policy

• Check for a technical fault first. Around one in five drops I audit during a confirmed rollout turns out to be canonical, indexing or redirect damage that coincided with the dates.
• Check clicks against impressions. Stable impressions with falling clicks is displacement, not a demotion.
• Check whether the loss is concentrated. A handful of pages carrying the whole decline is competitive, not algorithmic.

Work through the seven causes of a drop with no update before assuming this one was responsible.

Source: Google ranking updates list