Google Spam Update and GSC Image Data: What Owners Should Do

A plain-English look at Google's spam update and image search data in Search Console, plus what local service businesses should check and fix this month.

Published October 25, 2026 by the Digital Marketing Raleigh team.

Google Spam Update and GSC Image Data: What Owners Should Do

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Every few months, the search marketing world gets a fresh batch of news from Google. Recent industry roundups covered two items worth a closer look if you run a local service business: another Google spam update, and more attention on image search data inside Google Search Console. Neither headline sounds urgent when you are juggling service calls, payroll, and a truck that needs new tires. Both, however, can affect how many people find you online and how many of them pick up the phone.

This article explains both topics in plain English. We will cover what a spam update actually does, how to tell whether one touched your website, why image search data matters for trades like pest control, HVAC, plumbing, and roofing, and what to do over the next 30 days. We will not throw numbers at you that nobody can verify. What follows is practical reasoning based on how Google describes its own systems and on the patterns many local business owners run into.

What a Google Spam Update Actually Is

Google runs automated systems that try to identify websites breaking its spam policies. Most of the time, those systems work quietly in the background. A "spam update" is when Google announces that it has improved or retrained those systems and is rolling the changes out across search results. Rollouts typically take days or a few weeks to finish, and rankings can move around during that window.

It helps to separate a spam update from the other kinds of updates Google announces:

Core updates are broad changes to how Google evaluates overall quality and relevance. A site can lose ground in a core update without doing anything wrong, simply because other pages are judged more helpful.
Spam updates target specific behaviors Google considers manipulative. If a spam update hurts your site, the usual question is "what are we doing that looks like a policy violation?" rather than "how do we become more helpful?"
Manual actions are different again. A person at Google reviews a site and applies a penalty. These show up in a dedicated report inside Search Console, and you get a notice explaining the issue.

That distinction matters because the fix depends on the cause. Owners sometimes panic after any ranking drop and start rewriting everything. If the drop lines up with a spam update, you want to look closely at specific risky practices. If it lines up with a core update, the work looks more like improving content and the overall experience. If nothing lines up with an announced update at all, the cause may be technical, competitive, or seasonal.

The Spam Policies That Trip Up Local Service Businesses

Google publishes its spam policies, and most of them are aimed at obvious bad actors: hacked content, malware, cloaking, and similar tactics. The average roofing company is not doing any of that. A handful of policies, though, overlap with marketing shortcuts that have been sold to small businesses for years. These are the ones worth reviewing.

Doorway pages and thin city pages

A common local SEO tactic is to create one page for every town in a service area: "Pest Control in Cary," "Pest Control in Apex," "Pest Control in Garner," and so on. Done well, these pages can be genuinely useful. Done poorly, they are near-copies of each other with only the city name swapped out. Google's policies describe doorway pages as pages created to rank for specific searches that funnel visitors to the same destination without offering unique value. Dozens of templated city pages can look a lot like that.

The test is simple to describe and harder to pass: would a person in that town learn something on that page they could not learn on your main service page? Local details, real projects in the area, specific pest pressures or housing styles, permitting notes, and driving logistics can make a city page legitimate. A paragraph of boilerplate with a different town name does not.

Scaled content abuse

Google has policies against producing large amounts of content mainly to manipulate rankings, regardless of whether a person or a tool wrote it. For local businesses, this usually shows up as a blog stuffed with dozens of short, generic posts that all say roughly the same thing. "10 Signs You Need a New Roof" followed by "12 Signs Your Roof Needs Replacing" followed by "Signs It Is Time for Roof Replacement" is not a content strategy. It is the same article three times.

Publishing regularly is fine. Publishing a lot of low-value material in hopes that volume alone will win is the risk. Fewer, better articles that answer real customer questions tend to hold up better over time.

Link schemes

Buying links, swapping links in bulk, or paying for placements on networks of low-quality sites can all run against Google's policies. Many owners never bought links on purpose but hired a vendor years ago who did. If you have ever received a report listing hundreds of "backlinks" from sites you have never heard of, it is worth asking what those were.

Keyword stuffing and hidden text

Older websites sometimes carry leftovers from earlier SEO eras: footer blocks listing every town and service, white text on a white background, or paragraphs that repeat "best plumber Raleigh" to the point of sounding robotic. These tactics are explicitly called out in Google's policies. They also make the site look less trustworthy to real visitors.

Expired domain and site reputation issues

Google has also addressed practices like buying an expired domain with existing authority to host unrelated content, or hosting third-party content on a site mainly to ride that site's reputation. Most local service businesses are not doing this, but if a marketing vendor set up "microsites" or bought old domains on your behalf, it is reasonable to ask what they are and why they exist.

How to Tell Whether a Spam Update Affected Your Site

Before changing anything, gather evidence. Guessing leads to expensive rewrites that may not address the real problem. Here is a straightforward process an owner or office manager can follow in Google Search Console.

Wait for the rollout to finish. Rankings often bounce during a rollout. Judging the impact halfway through can lead to the wrong conclusion. Google usually announces when an update has completed.
Open the Performance report. Look at clicks and impressions over the last several months. Use the date comparison feature to compare a period after the update with a similar period before it.
Check for seasonality. Pest control, HVAC, and roofing all have strong seasonal swings. A drop in clicks in late fall may have nothing to do with Google and everything to do with the weather. Compare against the same period last year if you have the data.
Look at pages, not just totals. Filter by page to see which URLs lost traffic. If the losses cluster around templated city pages or thin blog posts, that is a meaningful clue. If the losses are spread evenly across the site, the cause may be broader.
Check the Manual Actions report. It lives under the Security and Manual Actions section. If it says no issues were detected, you are dealing with algorithmic changes, not a human penalty.
Look at queries. A drop in impressions for a few high-value searches, such as your main service plus your city, tells a different story than a broad decline across hundreds of minor searches.

Many owners find that once they lay the data out this way, the picture becomes much clearer. Sometimes the answer is that nothing meaningful changed. Sometimes it points directly at a section of the website that needs attention.

What If You Were Hit?

If the evidence suggests a spam update reduced your visibility, the path forward is less about clever tricks and more about cleanup. Google has generally indicated that sites can recover from algorithmic spam demotions after the problematic behavior stops, though recovery is not instant. The systems need time to recognize that the site has changed.

Practical steps include:

Consolidate or remove thin city pages. If you have 40 near-identical location pages, consider keeping a smaller number of genuinely detailed pages for the areas you serve most, and redirecting or removing the rest.
Merge overlapping blog posts. Combine three weak articles on the same topic into one strong one. Redirect the old URLs to the new version.
Clean up keyword-stuffed text. Rewrite footers, sidebars, and service descriptions so they read naturally for a homeowner.
Review your link history. Ask any past vendors what link building they did. Stop any ongoing paid link programs.
Document what you changed and when. This makes it much easier to judge later whether your fixes helped.

If you did receive a manual action, the process is more formal. You fix the issue described in the notice, then submit a reconsideration request through Search Console explaining what you changed. Be specific and honest in that request.

Image Search Data in Google Search Console: Why It Matters

The second headline concerns image search data in Search Console. The Performance report has long allowed site owners to switch the search type to view results from Google Images separately from standard web results. Recent industry coverage has drawn renewed attention to image search reporting, and whatever the specific details of each interface change, the underlying point for business owners is the same: Google gives you a way to see how your images perform in search, and most local businesses never look at it.

To find it, open the Performance report, click the search type filter at the top, and choose Image. You will see clicks, impressions, average position, and the queries and pages tied to image results. For many local service businesses, the numbers will be modest. That is normal. The value is not in the size of the numbers but in what they reveal.

What image data can tell you

Which of your pages have images that show up in search at all. If none do, your images may be missing descriptive text, too large to load quickly, or simply generic stock photos that Google has seen a thousand times.
What people search when they find your images. Queries like "termite damage on floor joist" or "what does a cracked heat exchanger look like" tell you what homeowners are trying to understand. Those are excellent topics for articles and service pages.
Whether your project photos are working. Before and after roofing photos, completed installations, and inspection findings can all surface in image results when they are original and well labeled.

Why trades benefit from image search

People in the middle of a home problem often search visually. A homeowner finds droppings in the garage and wants to know what animal left them. Someone sees a stain on the ceiling and wants to know whether it is a roof leak or a plumbing leak. A person notices frost on an outdoor AC unit in summer and wants to know if that is a problem. These are moments when an image from a local expert can appear, and a click can lead to a phone call.

Many owners find that their own job-site photos are more useful than anything a stock library offers. A clear picture of real termite tubes on a Raleigh-area foundation, labeled properly and placed on a helpful page, can do more work than a polished generic photo of a smiling technician.

How the Two Headlines Connect

At first glance, a spam update and image search reporting seem unrelated. One is about penalties, the other about a report. In practice, they point toward the same lesson: Google keeps rewarding original, specific, genuinely useful material and keeps getting better at filtering out shortcuts.

Original photos are a strong example of the kind of content that is hard to fake at scale. A business that documents its real work, explains it clearly, and organizes it well is building exactly the sort of website spam updates are designed to leave alone. A business relying on templated pages, recycled stock images, and bulk blog posts is building the kind of website that tends to wobble every time Google tightens its systems.

That does not mean every stock photo is a problem or every city page is risky. It means the safest long-term approach is to lean into what only your business can show and say.

A Practical Image Checklist for Local Service Websites

You do not need a photography budget to improve how your images perform. You need a habit and a little organization. Here is a checklist that works for most pest control, HVAC, plumbing, and roofing companies.

Take photos on real jobs. With customer permission, photograph the problem, the work in progress, and the finished result. Avoid capturing house numbers, license plates, or faces without consent.
Rename files before uploading. A file called IMG_4482.jpg tells Google nothing. A file called attic-rodent-entry-point-repair.jpg describes the content.
Write useful alt text. Alt text describes the image for people using screen readers and helps search engines understand it. Describe what is actually in the photo in a short, natural sentence. Do not stuff it with keywords or city names.
Resize and compress. Phone photos are often far larger than a web page needs. Oversized images slow your site, which frustrates visitors on mobile. Most website platforms or simple tools can shrink files without visible quality loss.
Place images near relevant text. A photo of a cracked heat exchanger belongs on a page explaining furnace inspections, with nearby text that explains what the reader is seeing.
Add captions where they help. A brief caption such as "Moisture damage found under a shingle during a roof inspection" adds context for both people and search engines.
Keep your Google Business Profile photos fresh too. Those photos live in a separate system from your website, but the same habit of uploading real job photos supports both.
Check the Image search type in Search Console every month or two. Watch which pages start earning impressions and which queries appear. Use those queries as ideas for new content.

A note of caution: do not take this as a reason to upload hundreds of near-identical photos. The same logic that applies to scaled text content applies here. A smaller number of clear, well-labeled, relevant images is more useful than a gallery of blurry duplicates.

A 30-Day Action Plan for Busy Owners

Here is a realistic way to act on all of this without taking over your month. Each week has a focused set of tasks that an owner, office manager, or marketing partner can handle.

Week one: gather the facts

Confirm you have access to Google Search Console for your website. If you do not, find out who set it up and get owner-level access.
Check the Manual Actions report.
Compare clicks and impressions for the past three months against the prior period and, if possible, the same months last year.
Switch the search type to Image and note which pages and queries appear.

Week two: review risky content

List every city or location page on your site. Read three of them side by side. If they are nearly identical, mark them for consolidation or rewriting.
Scan your blog for overlapping posts on the same topic. Mark candidates to merge.
Look for keyword-heavy footers or hidden blocks of text and flag them for cleanup.
Ask any current or past vendors for a written summary of link building or content work they performed.

Week three: fix and improve

Rewrite or consolidate the weakest location pages, adding real local details and project examples.
Merge overlapping blog posts and set up redirects from the old addresses.
Replace generic stock images on your top service pages with real job photos, properly named and described.
Compress oversized images on your most visited pages.

Week four: set up habits

Create a simple process for technicians to share job photos, such as a shared folder or group thread.
Schedule a monthly 20-minute review of Search Console, including the Image search type.
Pick two or three questions customers ask often and plan genuinely helpful articles around them.
Write down what you changed this month so future reviews have context.

Most of these tasks are not technically difficult. The challenge for most owners is time and consistency, which is where many businesses decide to bring in help.

Where a Done-For-You Service Fits

Digital Marketing Raleigh exists for local service owners who would rather run their business than read about Google updates. Operated by Petronella Technology Group, Inc. here in Raleigh, the service handles the ongoing work of keeping a local business visible: website content, search fundamentals, Google Business Profile upkeep, and the routine monitoring that catches problems before they become expensive.

When an update like this one rolls out, our approach is the same one described above. We look at the data first, compare it against seasonality and past performance, identify any risky content, and fix what actually needs fixing. We avoid the shortcuts that tend to get caught in spam updates, because cleaning up after them costs more than doing the work properly the first time.

You can learn more about how the service works on our home page, read how we stand behind the work on our guarantee page, and browse more practical articles like this one in our Field Notes blog. If you are looking for a memorable way to build your brand beyond search results, our custom jingles are another tool local businesses use to stick in customers' minds.

Common Mistakes to Avoid After an Update

Updates create anxiety, and anxiety leads to rushed decisions. Here are a few mistakes many owners make that are worth avoiding.

Rewriting the entire website overnight. Large, unplanned changes make it impossible to tell what helped and what hurt. Change things in deliberate stages.
Buying a quick fix. Offers promising to "recover your rankings fast" after an update often involve the same tactics that cause problems in the first place.
Deleting pages without redirects. If you remove a page that had traffic or links, point its address to the most relevant remaining page.
Ignoring the phone. Rankings are a means to an end. Track calls and form submissions alongside search data so you know whether changes are affecting real leads.
Assuming every drop is an update. Website outages, broken forms, expired hosting, and seasonal demand cause plenty of declines. Rule those out early.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I know if a Google spam update hurt my website?

Compare your Search Console performance data from before and after the update finished rolling out, and account for seasonal changes in your industry. Look at which pages lost traffic. If losses concentrate on thin, templated, or keyword-heavy pages, the update is a likely factor. Also check the Manual Actions report to rule out a human-applied penalty.

Is a spam update the same as a penalty?

Not exactly. A spam update changes automated systems that affect rankings across many sites. A manual action is a penalty applied by a person at Google to a specific site, and it appears as a notice in Search Console. Algorithmic effects do not come with a notice, which is why careful data review matters.

Are city or location pages against Google's rules?

Location pages themselves are not the problem. Pages that are nearly identical apart from a swapped city name can resemble doorway pages, which Google's policies discourage. Location pages with genuine local information, real project examples, and useful details for residents of that area are a different matter.

Where do I find image search data in Search Console?

Open the Performance report, click the search type filter near the top, and select Image. You will see clicks, impressions, queries, and pages tied to Google Images results. Interface details can change over time, so if the layout looks different, look for the search type or similar filter in the Performance section.

Do image results really matter for a plumbing or HVAC company?

They can. Homeowners often search visually when trying to identify a problem, such as a leak, a damaged part, or signs of pests. Original, clearly labeled photos from your real jobs can appear in those searches and lead people to your website. The traffic may be modest, but the queries often reveal what customers are worried about.

Should I stop using stock photos entirely?

Not necessarily. Stock images can fill gaps, especially on pages where a real photo is hard to get. Original job photos tend to carry more value, though, because they show your actual work and are less likely to appear on hundreds of other websites. Gradually replacing stock images on your most important pages is a reasonable goal.

How long does it take to recover from a spam update?

There is no fixed timeline. Google's systems need time to recognize that a site has changed, and recovery depends on how significant the issues were and how thoroughly they were addressed. Owners should plan for a period of months rather than days and focus on making lasting improvements rather than chasing quick movements.

Do I need to react to every Google update?

No. Most updates require no action from a well-run local business website. The right response is to check your data, confirm whether anything meaningful changed, and act only when the evidence points to a specific issue. A steady monthly review routine handles most of this without drama.

If you would rather have someone else watch for updates, review your Search Console data, and keep your website on the right side of Google's policies, Digital Marketing Raleigh can help. Call 919-348-4912 or use the contact form at the contact page to start a conversation about your business.