September Product Reviews Update

Periodically, Google make improvements to their automated ranking systems to ensure that people see product reviews that share in-depth research, rather than thin content that simply summarises a bunch of products. When Google release an improvement like this, they call it a product reviews update. This page explains more about how a product reviews update works, and what you can do to assess and improve your content.

How a product reviews update works

A product reviews update aims to better reward high quality product reviews, content that provides insightful analysis and original research, and is written by experts or enthusiasts who know the topic well. Currently, this update only involves English searches globally.

A product reviews update works primarily to evaluate product review content on a page-level basis. However, for sites that have a substantial amount of product review content, any content within a site might be evaluated by the update. If you don’t have a lot of product reviews (a substantial not-single-digit-percentage part of your entire site is made up of them), a site-wide evaluation is not likely to happen.

Structured data might help us better identify if something is a product review, but they don’t solely depend on it.

What does a product review update mean for my site?

To learn more about how to create content that’s successful with a product review update, see our help page on how to write high quality product reviews.

Assuming improvements have been made, content that was impacted by a product reviews update might not recover until the next product reviews update is released. However, note that our automated assessment of product review content is only one of many factors used in ranking content, so changes can happen at any time for various reasons.