Industry News

So we have been watching the July 2022 Google Product Reviews Update for some time and noticed that based on SEO chatter from within the community, it likely really kicked in on Friday afternoon. But the automated Google search result tracking tools really did not show much, in aggregate, but as of this morning, they now are.

On July 27th Google said it began to roll out the July 2022 Google Product Reviews update. But we didn't see it impact the Google search results until a couple of days later on Friday afternoon, July 29th.

Google has updated its Google Search Quality Raters Guidelines PDF just a bit over 9 months since the last update. The document keeps getting smaller, from 175 pages in 2020 to 172 pages in 2021 and now to 167 pages in 2022.

The fourth version of the Google Product Reviews Update is now rolling out - this update is called - you guessed it - the July 2022 Google Product Reviews Update. This update, like previous updates, will take about two to three weeks to fully roll out.

As many of you know, there was a pretty massive indexing issue impacting new content in Google Search most of Friday, July 15th, but that was pretty much isolated to that Friday. Now, I am seeing signals of a Google search ranking algorithm update on Saturday, July 16th.

There may be another indexing issue in Google Search. None of the articles I posted this morning on this site are showing yet in Google Search, even when I search for it by the exact title or do a site command. The Wall Street Journal is not showing any new content in Google Search in the past hour either.

A couple of weeks ago, Patrick Stock of Ahrefs released a bombshell report showing that on average about 50% of queries in Search Console are hidden, i.e. classified as anonymized. I reached out to Google, giving them a chance to respond to this, and the result led to Google updating its help document on anonymized queries and the export/API capabilities.

Yet again, we are seeing more volatility and ranking instability in the Google Search results. It probably started around July 9th through July 10th or so and we are seeing more chatter and many of the tools showing spikes.

Over the past few days there has been some chatter within the SEO community about more Google search ranking algorithmic fluctuations and volatility. This comes after over a week of relative calmness in the Google search results.

Hope you all had a nice July 4th weekend, here is the July 2022 Google webmaster report to catch you up on the past month. We had two confirmed algorithm updates this past month and many unconfirmed. We also had changes to Search Console, SEO documentation updates, local and maps features and tons of user interfaces.