On April 12th at noon, while I was offline, Google released the April 2023 reviews update that expanded the product reviews update to go beyond just products and also impacted services and things. It has been just under a week since it launched, and so far, while the sites that did see an impact saw a significant impact, I am not seeing massive widespread impacts like you would see from a core update.
Glenn Gabe covered what changed with this update and some of what he saw within 24-hours of launch over here. So read that first, if you missed it. Let’s dig a bit into how big this update was so far, note – it is not done rolling out.
What SEOs Are Seeing
Let’s first start with examples of specific sites hit by this update from Glenn and others on Twitter. As you can see, if you were hit, it had a massive impact on your visibility:
As Glenn noted, Semrush did a database upgrade of some sort, and if you are looking at Semrush data, you need to keep that in mind. Doing a database update that can impact these charts while Google is rolling out an update is not the best timing for Semrush.
Here is some of the chatter at WebmasterWorld, Black Hat World and the comments area here after April 12th:
Google Tracking Tools
Here are what the tools are showing, in aggregate, remember it first started to roll out on April 12th mid-day:
So, it seems like this update did do damage but not as widespread as many some other Google updates.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Black Hat World.
April 20th Tremors
Update: April 20th, there were some tremors on the 19th according to the SEO community.
Glenn Gabe posted:
Here is more chatter in the WebmasterWorld forums:
Here are screenshots of some of the tracking tools showing big movement with this April 20th or so tremor:
