Open two Google pages before you open a vendor thread
The search updates list is what Google has chosen to document. The status dashboard at status.search.google.com carries incidents and some update notes with a time. If the day your clicks fell is not on either page as a link-spam update, you do not have a link-spam update. You have a traffic change. Those are different operational problems. The first wants the log below. The second wants a page audit and a ban on same-week link buying. This article names no 2026 core update and no 2026 link spam update. Naming one without those pages would be a fake news post.
The spam policies apply on ordinary days. You do not need an update announcement to take an exact-match anchor off the next order. Waiting for an update to do basic hygiene is how the log becomes an emergency every quarter.
A log filled in for a week with no Google note
The numbers below are a teaching fill, like Ledgerline. They are not a ChainEpic customer. Use them to see how a finished log reads, then replace every line.
| Line | What got written |
|---|---|
| Primary post | None on the updates page or the status dashboard for a link spam update on 2 March 2026. Stopped calling it an update in client mail. |
| URL that moved | ledgerline.example/renewals. Clicks 28 days before: 410. Clicks 28 days after: 360. Impressions flat. Position from 8.4 to 9.1 on the five saved queries. |
| Did the page itself change? | Title rewritten on 28 February. Canonical unchanged. No noindex. The title change is the first suspect, not the links. |
| Paid placements in the prior 6 months | Two. Both brand anchors, both still 200, both indexed, rel as agreed. Neither matches a pattern Google did not announce. |
| What we will not do this week | No new guest posts. No 'recovery' basket. Revert or refine the title, then re-export in 28 days. |
The useful line is the title rewrite. A 50-click drop beside a title change is a page story. Buying TECH-107 the same afternoon because a newsletter said 'links are volatile' would have spent $349 to avoid looking at the title. The ban on new orders is the control. It lasts until the next export, not until anxiety fades.
The client email is four lines, because longer emails invent a cause. 'Clicks on /renewals moved from 410 to 360 between the two 28-day exports. There is no link-spam note on Google's updates page for 2 March. The title was rewritten on 28 February. We are not placing guest posts this week. Next export is in 28 days.' If they reply asking for a recovery package, send the same four lines again. A second paragraph that offers TECH-107 is you changing the decision in the footnote.
When a real note exists, change three lines
Line 1 becomes the URL and the date of Google's post, quoted, not paraphrased from a tweet. Line 4 gains a mark next to any placement that matches what the note describes. If the note is about site reputation abuse or about a different system, do not mark your brand-anchor guest posts just because the word 'link' appeared in a headline. Line 5 stays 'no new burst' unless the note tells publishers to do something specific, in which case you do that thing and you still do not buy twelve links on Friday.
Sitewide totals lie during these weeks. A blog can lose informational clicks while the product URL holds. Filter the export to the URL you paid to support. The target URL guide is how that URL was chosen. If you never chose, you will now discover you have been reporting the whole property, and the recovery buy will aim at the wrong path.
What we will not publish in the week of a scare
A percentage of sites that lost traffic. A quote that is not on the two Google pages. A package called a recovery. If this blog covers a specific update later, the first paragraph will link the primary note and will say which catalog cells we rechecked, which is a smaller claim than 'we analyzed the update.' Until that link exists, the filled log above is the whole method: prove there was a note, prove what your URL did, prove whether the page changed, then wait one export.
FAQ
Where is your recap of the latest link spam update?
We do not have one, because we do not write the recap without Google's note. Check the search updates list. If a note is there and we have not written about it, the log on this page is still the thing to fill while you wait.