Google July 2022 Product Ratings Update is complete

Google has quietly updated its landing page for the update to notes Yes July 2022 Product Ratings Update ended up rolling out on August 2, 2022. When it was first announced on July 27, 2022, Google said it would “take 2-3 weeks to complete,” but apparently it only took six days.

July 27 to August 6. this July 2022 Product Ratings Update It only took six days to fully deploy and to be honest, that’s surprising. We saw a lot limited changes from the tracking tools, and honestly, while some sites seemed to have a hard time with this update, there didn’t seem to be much chatter from the SEO community about ranking changes due to this update. We actually saw a peak on August 3 but apparently that was after this update was completed.

Google Product Ratings Update. The Google product reviews update aims to encourage review content that goes beyond most of the templated information you see online. Google has said it will encourage these types of product reviews in its search results.

Google does not directly penalize lower-quality product reviews that have “weak content that simply summarizes a bunch of products.” However, if you provide such content and find that your ranking is lowered because other content is promoted above yours, it will definitely feel like a penalty. Technically, according to Google, this is not a penalty for your content, Google is just rewarding sites with more insightful transparent content by ranking above yours.

Technically, this update should only affect product review content and not other types of content.

Why do we care? If your site offers product review content, you’ll want to check your rankings to see if it’s affected you. Has your Google organic traffic improved, decreased, or stayed the same?

In the long run, you’ll want to make sure you put a lot more detail and effort into your product review content. Make it unique to stand out from the competition online.

About the author

Barry Schwartz, a contributing editor for Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He is the owner RustyBrick, an online consulting firm based in New York. It also runs Round table of search engines, a popular search blog on highly advanced SEM topics. Barry can be tracked on Twitter here.