Google has quietly updated its update landing page to notate that the July 2022 product reviews update has finished rolling out on August 2, 2022. When it was first announced on July 27, 2022, Google said it would “take 2-3 weeks to complete,” but clearly this only took six days.
July 27 to August 6. This July 2022 product reviews update only took six days to fully roll out and to be honest, that is surprising. We saw very limited changes from the tracking tools and honestly, while some sites seemed to get hard by this update, it does not seem there was a lot of SEO community chatter around ranking changes due to this update. In fact, we saw a spike on August 3rd but clearly, that was after this update was complete.
Google product reviews update. The Google product reviews update aims to promote review content that is above and beyond much of the templated information you see on the web. Google said it will promote these types of product reviews in its search results rankings.
Google is not directly punishing lower-quality product reviews that have “thin content that simply summarizes a bunch of products.” However, if you provide such content and find your rankings demoted because other content is promoted above yours, it will definitely feel like a penalty. Technically, according to Google, this is not a penalty against your content, Google is just rewarding sites with more insightful review content with rankings above yours.
Technically, this update should only impact product review content and not other types of content.
Why we care. If your website offers product review content, you will want to check your rankings to see if you were impacted. Did your Google organic traffic improve, decline or stay the same?
Long term, you are going to want to ensure that you put a lot more detail and effort into your product review content. Make it unique so it stands out from the competition on the web.
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About The Author
Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.
