A retailer on King Street who’d spent two years climbing towards page one woke up in the last week of August to find their listing gone — not dropped a few places, gone, buried past position 100. They rang us convinced their website had been hacked. It hadn’t. Google’s August spam update had simply moved the goalposts, and this one moved further than most.
The update ran for just under three days, from the 18th to the 21st, and it hit hard. Early analyses reported sharp falls, with some pages that had been in the top ten dropping out of the first hundred results once it finished rolling out. That’s not a ranking wobble — that’s a site effectively disappearing from search for anyone not on page eleven.
What tends to trigger it isn’t usually a mystery once you dig in. Thin affiliate pages with no original content, keyword-stuffed service pages written for the algorithm rather than the customer, and link schemes bought in bulk from low-quality directories are the usual culprits. We pull the Search Console coverage report first, then check the backlink profile for anything that looks like it was bought rather than earned, because that’s normally where the damage starts.
There’s a second change worth knowing about if you run Google Ads alongside your organic work. From the 1st of September, Google began automatically moving eligible Search campaigns onto AI Max — anything already using Automatically Created Assets or the broad match setting at campaign level gets swept in without you opting in. Worth checking your account settings this month rather than finding out by accident when your cost-per-click shifts.
We check both of these, organic penalties and paid campaign settings, as part of every audit we run for clients along the Hammersmith Broadway and King Street stretch. If your traffic’s dipped since late August, get in touch with SEO Optimizers and we’ll have a proper look before you spend another month guessing. seooptimizers.co.uk