Google has just completed its September 2026 spam update after its initial rollout last September 24.
The update took over two weeks, noticeably longer than the three other spam updates of 2026.
The rollout was complete as of October 8, 2026.
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) October 8, 2026
Google did not say the update was aimed at one specific tactic, with its spam policies already warning against publishing large numbers of pages mainly to influence rankings when those pages add little original value.
That is where manufacturing sites can get messy.
Buyers may search by product, process, material, application, industry, or location, across traditional and AI search, which can lead to companies often building separate pages for each.
And over time, some of those pages can start answering nearly the same question.
For weCreate LLC, a top industrial marketing agency ,this is a familiar problem.
Agency Owner, Nathan Wheeler, explains that when faced with this situation, he first looks at whether a page gives the buyer something they cannot already get elsewhere on the site.
"If two pages are answering the same question with slightly different wording, there usually isn’t much reason for both of them to exist," he says.
"A good manufacturing page should help someone understand a real capability, application, product, or buying decision. If it can’t do that, adding another URL probably isn’t helping."
YouTuber, Edward Sturm, breaks down Google’s September 2026 spam update, including the early volatility and expected rollout timeline:
When Manufacturing SEO Pages Become Too Similar
No two manufacturing services are exactly the same, so someone looking for aerospace machining may need very different information from someone looking for medical machining.
Buyers are often doing much of that research before they ever speak to a supplier, with Thomas finding that 70% of the industrial buying journey is already complete by then.
"Aerospace machining and medical machining can deserve their own pages if the standards, materials, tolerances, certifications, or buying process are different," Wheeler says.
"If all you did was change the industry name in the headline and leave everything else basically the same, that page is much harder to defend."
The same problem can turn up with city pages, services, applications, or product variations.
Google’s spam policies warn against substantially similar pages created for related searches and against publishing large amounts of content that add little value.
In instances where the information barely changes, a second page has to earn its place.
Wheeler discusses the role of SEO and digital marketing in helping manufacturers reach buyers online:
How Manufacturers Should Structure SEO Content
A large industrial website may still need hundreds of pages. What matters is whether people can understand how those pages fit together.
Products can sit in one section, capabilities in another, with applications and industries handled separately.
Internal links can connect them without creating a fresh URL every time two keywords happen to pair well.
"If the hierarchy is doing its job, you should be able to organize products, capabilities, applications, and industries without creating a new page every time two terms can be paired together," Wheeler says.
"Internal links help too because they show how those pages relate instead of leaving a pile of similar URLs sitting on their own."
Google still has to be able to crawl and index those pages, follow the links, and make sense of the site.
Speed and technical performance matter too, but they don’t make repeated information any more useful to a buyer.
Yoast explains how internal links help search engines understand how pages relate and how a site is organized:
What Manufacturing Sites Should Audit Now
Google told sites affected by the update to review its spam policies and noted that recovery may take time.
Wheeler says that manufacturers should begin with the parts of the site where similar pages have piled up around the same product, service, industry, or location.
That could mean several city pages for one service, industry pages built from the same base copy, or product and application pages covering much of the same information.
Reading those pages side by side usually makes the overlap easier to spot.
Some will need more detail, while others may work better combined or moved somewhere else on the site.
"If you can explain why a page exists in terms of the customer, keep working on it," Wheeler explains.
"If the only answer is that there was search volume for another variation, that is probably the page I would look at first."
For manufacturing leaders, the useful exercise is to stop looking at the site as a collection of ranking opportunities and read it the way a buyer would.
For those in the industry, perhaps it's time to ask yourself a simple question.
If search traffic disappeared tomorrow, which pages would you still keep because somebody genuinely needed the information on them?
