August 2026 Google Search Observations

[RedBar]

That's it, I've had enough of all this MSFT brute force php garbage. It's the start of a new month and MSFT has unsuccessfully attempted thousand of PVs, over 1K per site ... I am closing all my sites but two plus a couple of clients.

BTW, some were from new MSFT IPs I've not seen before.

[edited by: not2easy at 4:03 pm (utc) on Aug 1, 2026]
[edit reason] New month, new thread [/edit]

[Micha]

The update is done. It went pretty fast again...
[status.search.google.com ]

[RedBar]

Day 7 of the utterly pointless Azure attacks for me. Although I do not want to use Cloudflare I am experimenting with it to see if I can stop all the plain error pages being generated by supposedly blocking the most prolific IPs which, for me, seemingly are not that many.

I do hope I'm doing this correctly, any advice?

[RedBar]

Am I being dunb?

In Cloudflare where the heck is the supposed WAF?

Or is this not FREE?

[not2easy]

There are limitations on the free version, but the Security/Web Application Firewall (WAF) is not always a paid option. See the Cloudflare discussions in the AdSense forum this month: [webmasterworld.com...]
;)

[RedBar]

Aha, thanks. Yesterday it allowed me to create an IP block list however today that's disappeared. CF has so many complicated options it's ridiculous except for those who seriously need them.

So far the good news, the basic settings seem to have had a big impact according to Webalizer but sot so much insofar as Awstats is concerned.

I've added three much higher traffic sites today so tomorrow's stats will be interesting.

I seem to recall that last time I tried CF it caused an email problem therefore I need to be careful which other sites are added.

[RedBar]

So far the good news, the basic settings seem to have had a big impact according to Webalizer but sot so much insofar as Awstats is concerned.

This is interesting since most commentators consider Awstats to be more accurate than Webalizer however, so far for these four sites, Awstats is showing pretty much the same metrics yet Webalizer is showing drastic reductions and this is also backed-up by CPanel's bandwidth usage but it never was a bandwidth concern for me, or so I thought!

This is using CF's standard settings with Client Side Security and Bot Fight Mode selected on their quick start guide intro page.

For me I found yesterday that WAF is a paid-for extra therefore will continue with this experiment for a few days as-is.

[gatormark]

On Cloudflare's new dashboard, they merged WAF, Firewall Rules, and Rate Limiting into Security rules.

[RedBar]

On Cloudflare's new dashboard, they merged WAF, Firewall Rules, and Rate Limiting into Security rules.

Thanks, there are so many options and stuff going on CF really needs to simplify everything for newbies ... it's far too much all in one go.

UPDATE: Awstats is reporting the drops, it was my poor eyesight that missed it, Webalizer is much clearer in this respect.

Initial reductions after 3 days appears to be in the 80-90% region which is huge. It's never been a bandwidth issue for me, solely a means of stopping all my 400 plain error pages distorting metrics. CF seems to mostly have stopped the Azure probes which are continuing on my non-CF sites.

I'm trying to wrap my head around the traffic stats CF generates since their numbers seem high to me ... This may be me as I find more "things" therefore I am now not sure whether realworld traffic is up, down or the same.

[Whitey]

There’s an interesting follow-up on Google’s August 2026 spam update:

[searchenginejournal.com...]

Reports suggest scaled, automated AI/SEO content may have been particularly affected, although Google has not confirmed that AI content itself was targeted.

AI isn’t necessarily the problem; mass-produced, search-first content with little original value may be.

One caution: Google’s update ran August 18–21, 2026 and is now complete, so we should soon have better evidence from large AI-content sites showing exactly what patterns were hit. I think those reports will surface soon.

For those scaling AI publishing, human QA, original data/research, genuine usefulness and selective publishing look increasingly important.

So I’d be interested to hear from the survivors as well as those making inroads into increased traffic (just like the quoted Expedia ceo said recently about robust expansion around GEO, while SEO declined).

[RedBar]

Cloudflare seems to be doing, more or less, the job I want it to do however I can't wrap my head around their statistics of Page Views, Uniques and Total Requests plus the navigation is so poor, as a non-frequent user, it takes me ages to find absolutely anything. CF's language and descriptions are very confusing.

Otherwise, for the moment, it's doing what I need however I wouldn't want to pay for this interface, 1/10 for that CF.

For CF regular users it's possibly fine but CF definitely does not know the KISS principle.

[Martin Ice Web]

@Whitey,

the problem with the SPAM Update is that if your site has a big selection of same items from different manufacturers ( and has variants of it like lenght and color ) the algo will see this as SPAM.
So the previous and this SPAM Update removed all those niche resellers. They have been replaced by "solo" websites only giving 1 or a very small slection and showing very little expertise.

For me as a customer, this is very bad. IMO this SPAM Updates are pushing users closer to ads.

[RedBar]

if your site has a big selection of same items from different manufacturers ( and has variants of it like lenght and color ) the algo will see this as SPAM.

I have to say this is an issue I have, so far, never experienced and I have a lot of very similar widgets BUT I do ensure that my title-bar, description, h1 and first words of my first paragraph ALL specify that widget. Likewise h2, h3 always specify that widget.

I do not leave it to chance for any search engine to guess or assume what that individual page is about.

Then again, all my pages are hand-made.

[RubicCubed]

So the previous and this SPAM Update removed all those niche resellers. They have been replaced by "solo" websites only giving 1 or a very small slection and showing very little expertise.

In other words, what Google removed has left mostly spam and low quality sites. Google restricting access to niche sellers with a wide variety of variants and niche specific expertise, while displaying variants in ads, is a sure fire way for Google to increase ad clicks. For sellers using G ads, such a policy would also reduce their ROI and would undoubtedly increase items returned by customers.

What's not so unique about this spam update are people reporting a large increase in AI O's. This too has an impact on niche sellers as they often demonstrate their product expertise with supporting authoritative content. The impact also extends to manufacturers who produce the product variants people are buying and who ultimately hold the highest level of knowledge for the items they produce.

[Martin Ice Web]

@Redbar,

when i say a big selection then i mean like 6-8 manufacturers with about 2500-3000 variants. I don´t know how to get each unique. (We do have aggregate pages with canonical-tag).
So a item-serie doens´t span to 200 pages with only slightly different title, h1, h2. But 1 unique summary-page. We do not use AI. All handwritten.
Disadvantage: the page will propably not show up for long tail keyword searches

[christianz]

the problem with the SPAM Update is that if your site has a big selection of same items from different manufacturers ( and has variants of it like lenght and color ) the algo will see this as SPAM.

It's on you. You forgot to inject EAT and first person experience with those product variant specifications. You also forgot about information gain and unique experiences that you have to add. And you forgot to create TickTock and YouTube video with yourself dancing and reading those product specs.

Now do all that and stop being a spammer, start providing value!

[Micha]

It would have been too good to be true. The spam update ends and we finally get some peace and quiet, but nope. All the signs of another update are there: massive volatility, tanking rankings, and ad performance hitting zero once again. Basically, everything we usually experience during an update. Google probably figured they hadn't pushed enough spam sites to the top yet.

By the way @Whitey: honestly, I didn't see spam sites disappearing at all. Quite the opposite, actually. As soon as the spam update wrapped up, sites churning out mass AI content completely dominated one of my niches. I keep wondering what all these "SEO experts" are actually looking at, because I can never replicate or confirm their findings.

[Martin Ice Web]

@christianz, I don´t know if you have read my comment. We do not have all this variants as pages itself. We have a aggregate pages ( please get info what this is, if you don´t know it) with lots of infos, pictures, videos and instructions.

Once again for you: with aggregate pages you loose long tail searches.

[christianz]

We do not have all this variants as pages itself. We have a aggregate pages

My point stands. Many small pages or larger aggregate pages - they are all useful, helpful and exactly what searchers are looking for. Except super dumb LLM pea-brain ranking algo assumes that everything that is not a TickTock video is spam.

[Sandros]

Observation from last core updates and our pages, we hit finaly back to number #1 from all competitors that we have. This meens, we didnt do anything wrong, only a bit small and better improvments that we did on pages few months back. Before that we have 3th position on google for 10+ years with highest rank of keywords. Blocking also specialy digitalocean, china, taiwan etc.. And also some other countryes that we track each day over server log.