On September 20th, 2022, Google announced that they have released the September 2022 product reviews update for English-language product reviews. This is the fifth version of the Google product reviews update. The most recent Google product review update was back near the end of July 2022. It is projected that the rollout could take 2 weeks to complete.
Today we released the September 2022 product reviews update for English-language product reviews. We’ll update our ranking release history page when the rollout is complete: https://t.co/sQ5COfdNcb
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) September 20, 2022
The product reviews update is a type of algorithm update that targets ranking product review-related content on the web that is most helpful and useful to searchers. With this being the fifth update of its kind, these types of updates started launching in April of 2021.
Google aims for these updates to help promote review content that is valuable and worthy to be seen amongst other reviews that are of lesser value. “The focus overall is on providing users with content that provides insightful analysis and original research, content written by experts or enthusiasts who know the topic well,” Google said about this update.
Google says it will promote these types of product reviews in its search results rankings. Technically, these updates should only impact product review content and not other types of content.
The rollout of this September 2022 product reviews update should normally take a few weeks. You should expect the bulk of the ranking volatility to happen in the earlier stages of this rollout.
It should impact those in the future who “create product reviews in any language”, however Google said the initial rollout will be “English-language product reviews”. Google added they have seen “positive effects” from this update in the past and the search company “plans to open up product review support for more languages” in the future.
Google also made a point to mention that if you see a change and wonder if it’s related to the recent core algorithm update or the product reviews update:
- If you produce product reviews, then it’s probably related to that.
- If not, then it might be related to the core update.
