Google's 18 spam policies and how to comply
type: NewsArticle
description: Google's 18 spam policies define manipulative practices that can result in ranking suppression, deindexing, or manual penalties, operating independently from quality frameworks like E-E-A-T. The March 2024 update added three new policies—scaled content abuse, site reputation abuse, and expired domain abuse—with enforcement continuing through 2025 and 2026 via increased spam updates and manual actions. The document serves as both an installation manual for building defensive infrastructure and an audit reference for identifying, remediating, and recovering from violations.
date published: 2026-05-24T01:03:28+00:00
date modified: 2026-05-24T01:33:03+00:00
language: en
is accessible for free: true
article body: Originally published atPart of ThatDevPro's open SEO + AI framework library.[thatdevpro.com].[ThatDevPro]is an SDVOSB-certified veteran-owned web + AI engineering studio. Open-source AI citation toolkit:[github.com/Janady13/aio-surfaces]. **Google's Explicit Anti-Spam Policies — What Gets Punished, How to Avoid It, and How to Recover** A comprehensive installation and audit reference for understanding Google's documented spam policies, identifying spam policy violations on a website, remediating violations, recovering from spam updates and manual actions, and building structural defenses against accidentally violating spam policies through scale or third-party content. This document is dual-purpose: installation manual and audit document. Cross-stack implementation note: the code samples in this framework are written in plain HTML for clarity. For React, Vue, Svelte, Next.js, Nuxt, SvelteKit, Astro, Hugo, 11ty, Remix, WordPress, Shopify, and Webflow equivalents of every pattern below, see[. For pure client-rendered SPAs (no SSR/SSG) see]`framework-cross-stack-implementation.md` [. For Tailwind-specific concerns (purge, dynamic classes, dark-mode CLS, focus accessibility) see]`framework-react.md` [.]`framework-tailwind.md` ## 1. Document Purpose & How to Use This Document ### 1.1 What This Document Is This is the canonical reference for Google's spam policies — the documented rules at `developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies` that define what Google considers manipulative practices, what triggers algorithmic spam updates, and what triggers manual actions. While the rest of the foundational framework library focuses on what to **do** to earn rankings and citations, this document focuses on what **not to do** — the practices that result in ranking suppression, deindexing, or manual penalties regardless of how strong other signals are. Spam policies are operationally distinct from quality frameworks. A site can score 130/130 on E-E-A-T, satisfy YMYL s…
publisher: Web Pulse
keywords: developer-tools, policy-regulation, enterprise-software, open-source, data
mentions: Google
mentions: ThatDevPro
mentions: SDVOSB
mentions: Janady13
mentions: React
mentions: Vue
mentions: Next.js
mentions: WordPress
citation: CreativeWork