Helpful Content, Core & Product Reviews Updates

Talk about a busy month, we didn’t just have one or two confirmed updates this past month – we had three! We had the helpful content update finish rolling out on September 9th, we then had the September 2022 core update kick off on the 12t, and then the September 2022 product reviews update on the 20th. Oh, and the core and product review updates both finished rolling out on the same day, the 26th of September.

We also thought there was a Google local search update but that just turned out to be some bug.

Google dropped the word count topic from its help documentation, told us what it considers quality issues and told us ton of SEO topics as summarized below.

Google Search Console got some new additions like new shopping tools and reports, the URL Inspection tool renders more, a new HTTPS report that is causing a lot of confusion and took away the international targeting report.

We had the big Search On event, most of these we saw Google testing or announced at Google I/O. Plus tons of more tests are summarized below…

And on the local side, we saw a spike in rejections, the removal of health attributes, and a new guideline around negative reviews.

If you missed last month, see the September 2022 Google webmaster report and the ongoing WebmasterWorld thread is mostly on the core and product reviews right now.

Here are the more important stories I pulled out for you all:

Google Algorithms:

Google SEO:
Google Search Console:
Google User Interface:
Google Local & Maps:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.