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:

Quick update on the Sep Product Reviews Update. Looks like Google pushed a BIG tremor on Sat into Sun & a # of sites that tanked w/the July PRU are recovering (w/out changing anything). I said in July that I expected changes there. Thx to the site owner letting me share this. pic.twitter.com/9clUFmmotj
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 27, 2022

OK, here's another site that got hit hard w/the July Product Reviews Update that surged back on Sunday when Google pushed a tremor. The site owner explained the July hit was a wakeup call & they have been addressing some things. But sure seems like this was a correction by Google pic.twitter.com/BnuaeY7zIY
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 27, 2022

Well, that sounds familiar! I've had a bunch of site owners reach out w/a similar situation. Great to see that recovery. Google seemed to address some flaws with the July PRU. :)
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 27, 2022

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

All of my sites are down around 25%.
How have ALL of them fallen basically the exact same percentage? Whatever this update is, it's the worst one yet for me.

For whatever reason I'm off the cliff edge today, after 13 hours I am at 13% of my 1-24 Sept average!
My first thought was the site was down or had been down, nope, we'll see what the rest of the day brings.

In the past few days, I've been seeing a rise in sites like TripAdvisor and TripSavvy, which are the travel information sector's equivalent of big box stores. I see that as an erosion of subject authority as a ranking factor.
The ranking difference isn't huge, but when you've been ranking at or near the top of the SERP for a bunch of important searches, a drop from the first position to the second--or from the second position to the third--can have a significant impact on Google traffic (especially if an answer box or a list of questions has been inserted after the first result).

25 year old site, medium-large, well established, first mover in our niche back in mid 90s, 20,000+ referring domains backlinking to us. Not a major brand.
The second the core update started running on the 13th we started dropping like a rock. Down 20% sitewide now, and continuing to drop. We were clearly hit by some invisible sitewide penalty, as EVERY SERP listing dropped for us by at least a spot, in many case many spots. We do not use any black hat SEO, keyword manipulation, unhelpful content, etc. We trimmed out our thin pages to improve quality indexing significantly over a year ago, and updated a good chunk of our content...

For my first 13 hours on Sunday I was almost flatlining and then traffic kicked-in resulting with an almost average Sunday plus the traffic has continued into today so far.

While my sites are all still down, today's numbers look more like -5-10% down from the norm instead of the -25% I was seeing earlier.

Seeing our site tumbling over the same visibility chart cliff as a very friendly to google cable news network's website does add some amusement to the situation...

20 year old site here. Aug update hit us slightly, but this update has been a major hit as well (though we have been on a slow slide this past year). Down another 20% it seems...

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