Google September Core Update & Product Reviews Update Both Completed On September 26th

Google Core Update

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.

Here are some quick facts on both these updates, now that they are done. But as you know, the core update took exactly two weeks to roll out, a full 14 days. The product reviews update took only six days to roll out.

Google September 2022 Core Update

Name: Google September 2022 Broad Core Update
Launched: September 12, 2022 at around 11:25 pm ET
Rollout: Two weeks – completing on September 26, 2022
Targets: It looks at all types of content
Penalty: It is not a penalty, it promotes or rewards great web pages
Global: This is a global update impacting all regions, in all languages.
Impact: Google would not tell me what percentage of queries or searches were impacted by this update but so far, this seems to be a typical core update that reaches wide and the impact is fast.
Discover: Core updates impact Google Discover and other features, also feature snippets and more.
Recover: If you were hit by this, then you will need to look at your content and see if you can do better with Google’s core update advice.
Refreshes: Google will do periodic refreshes to this algorithm but may not communicate those updates in the future. Maybe this is what we saw the past couple of weeks or all those unconfirmed Google updates.

Google September 2022 Product Reviews Update

Name: Google September 2022 Product Reviews Update
Launched: September 20, 2022 at around 4 am ET
Rollout: Six days – completing on September 26, 2022
Targets: It looks at product review content
Penalty: It is not a penalty, it promotes or rewards “insightful analysis and original research.”
Not a core update: Many are going to say this is a core update, it is not.
English Language but will expand: This is only looking at English-language content right now but likely will expand to other languages, this is a global launch. I am surprised it is still only English but it is, as we documented below.
Impact: Google would not tell me what percentage of queries or searches were impacted by this update.
Discover: This update can impact your performance in Google Discover, Google previously said.
Recover: If you were hit by this, then you will need to look at your content and see if you can do better with Google’s advice below
Refreshes: Google will do periodic refreshes to this algorithm but may not communicate those updates in the future. This may be the first refresh that Google has done, it is the first refresh Google communicated about.

Both updates were fairly large and had big impacts for many many sites. Which one impacted which, despite what Google said, can be hard to pin point.

I have a bit more on the core update impact here and the product reviews impact here.

SEO Chatter

Glenn Gabe, as do others, thinks the product reviews update, was a bit (maybe a simplification) of a correction on the fourth product reviews update. Meaning, they fixed some flaws with the fourth product reviews update with the last one, the fifth product reviews update. Here are some tweets from Glenn:

There was definitely a spike in chatter in the SEO community over the weekend, here is some of that chatter from WebmasterWorld:

There is a bit of chatter into today with SEOs saying they are still seeing volatility.