Google Releases February 2023 Product Reviews Update
Google announced an important update to its Product Reviews System on February 21, 2023. This month’s update to Google Search’s product reviews system builds off the September 2022 update, with an expansion to ten more widely-spoken languages, namely:
- Spanish
- German
- Italian
- French
- Vietnamese
- Indonesian
- Russian
- Dutch
- Portuguese
- Polish
Today we released the February 2023 product reviews update, which applies to these languages globally: English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Polish. It’ll take ~2 weeks to fully roll out. More here: https://t.co/YpNnK97G3O
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) February 21, 2023
The February 2023 Product Reviews update to Google Search’s system evaluates reviews on web pages as a factor for ranking on SERPs. Google prioritizes high quality reviews with insightful analysis and original research by experts or well-informed enthusiasts.
The product reviews system ensures that users see high quality reviews with in-depth research, rather than thin summaries of products that don’t truly help users or potential customers.
Reviews happen on a page-level basis. For business sites that have a substantial amount of product review content, Google might evaluate any content on the site. For smaller businesses (or those with few reviews), site-wide evaluations are not likely.
As the rollout for this service may take up to two weeks, you might see some fluctuations in your search rankings. According to Google, “content that was impacted by a product reviews update might not recover until the next product reviews update is released.” However, if your site is affected by these changes, don’t worry– it should settle after the update is finished.
