June 2021 spam update

A spam update in two parts, and a core update on top

Google confirmed this update on 23 June and said a second spam update would follow within days. Then the June 2021 core update was already running, having started on 2 June, and the July 2021 core update began on 1 July.

So the last week of June and the first week of July 2021 contained a spam update, a second spam update, and the tail and start of two core updates. Attribution from dates alone is not possible in that window.

What separates a spam demotion from a core demotion

Signal	Spam update	Core update
Severity	Often near-total for affected pages	Partial decline
Scope	Pages engaging a published spam policy	Broad across templates
Recovery clock	Continuous, 2 to 8 weeks after the fix	Waits for the next core update
What to fix	The policy violation	Content quality and site composition

If your site has nothing spammy on it

Then this update almost certainly did not touch you, regardless of the dates. Spam updates retrain SpamBrain against published spam policies: cloaking, hacked content, scraped content, auto-generated text, doorway pages, unmarked paid links. They do not assess general quality.

A drop in this window on a clean site belongs to one of the two core updates running either side of it, and the fix is quality work rather than cleanup. The page scope analyzer will show whether the loss was concentrated or broad, which settles it faster than the dates can.

Source: Google ranking updates list