Google says Search spam team remains well resourced

Google has confirmed that its Search spam team remains staffed and active, with Rajan Patel, VP of Engineering for Google Search, saying the group is still equipped to fight spam in search results.

The confirmation came after discussion around the Google August 2026 spam update, which the original article said was part of the team’s ongoing work to reduce spam in Google Search. Gagan Ghotra wrote on X that the latest update changed his view of how much support the team still has.

"August 2026 Spam Update just showed one thing .... spam team is still alive and writing new algorithms to tackle things!

Pre this update, I was like may be search team is not well staffed anymore (Google more focus on Gemini teams) and that's why they are letting rank some of these spam things like scaled listicles and not like algorithmic hammering those domains at scale but after this update, it seems like spam team is still well resource actually!!??"

Patel replied with a brief confirmation:

"Yes it is."

The original article also cited data from SE Ranking indicating the latest spam update had a larger impact than many previous spam updates. Mordy Oberstein from SE Ranking wrote on X, "This, to me, sums up the recent Google spam update the best.... the 82% increase in Google kicking URLs out of the top 100. (Because this is a spam, not a core update)."

Examples shared by Glenn Gabe pointed to major ranking declines tied to the update. In one post on X, he wrote:

"Big drop for this site with the August spam update. Scaled to 1.3M urls... Looks heavily programmatic. pic.twitter.com/hVAWjrATLK

• Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) August 24, 2026"

In another, Gabe said:

"Another huge drop for a site based on the August spam update. I always tell companies you don't want to be on the wrong side of a spam update... And I don't even want to get into what they are doing. It's terrible. I can tell you they have close to 250K urls indexed, though.… pic.twitter.com/vvSZUuyN2O

• Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) August 25, 2026"

Taken together, the comments and examples cited in the original article support Google’s position that the spam team is still actively working on new algorithms and remains well resourced.

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