Industry News

Google's Danny Sullivan told us that the Google product reviews update primarily evaluates product review content on a page-level basis, but not always. Danny added "for sites that have a substantial amount of product review content, any content within a site might be evaluated by the update."

Talk about a busy month, we didn't just have one or two confirmed updates this past month - we had three! We had the helpful content update finish rolling out on September 9th, we then had the September 2022 core update kick off on the 12t, and then the September 2022 product reviews update on the 20th.

As I called, Google has completed rolling out both the September 2022 core update and the September 2022 product reviews update while I was offline. Both officially finished rolling out on September 26, 2022 - so Monday.

A couple of weeks ago we reported on a possible Google local search ranking update that turned out to not be an update but rather a bug. Well, that bug seems to be fixed or being fixed now and rankings are beginning to return for these local service area businesses.

As you know, Google began to roll out the fifth Google product reviews update on September 20th during the roll-out of the September 2022 core update. I promised to return and share some of what we're seeing with this update, as it rolls out.

Google, at about 4 am ET today, September 20, 2022, has unleashed the fifth product reviews update. This was released prior to the September 2022 core update being completed, which was not excepted and Google's Danny Sullivan said likely would not happen - but it did happen.

Here’s a good analogy from Josephine Conneely to help figure out why growth might be stalling:

Imagine each of the 3 criteria pillars, Product, GTM and Org, as legs of a stool. Ideally each leg is of even height. This allows it to sturdily hold whatever is needed (in this case it’s increasing user volumes). Each leg can continue to grow (perhaps this is some sort of stool tree), and as long as the legs grow in tandem the success metrics of choice are safe. However, there may at times...

Google Search has started to roll out the second broad core update of the year, the September 2022 broad core update. It started on September 12, 2022 at about 11:25 am ET and can take about two weeks to roll out.