The February 2023 Product Reviews Update that rolled out last February 21 is now complete. It was expected to complete rolling out in two weeks and it looks like it finished right on time, unlike the December Helpful Content Update and Link Spam Update that took way longer than expected.
The update applied to these languages – English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, and Polish.
As a refresher, the product reviews system aims to reward high quality product reviews that provide insightful analysis and original research written by experts or enthusiasts that are knowledgeable about the topic. It works to ensure that people see product reviews that share in-depth research rather than thin content that simply summarizes a bunch of products.
The product reviews system primarily evaluates product reviews on a page-level basis but for sites that have a substantial amount of product reviews, any content within the site may be evaluated by the update. If your site does not have a lot or product reviews, a site-wide evaluation is not likely to happen.
Have you been affected by the update and wondering how to proceed? Check out our article on the February 2023 Product Reviews Update for more details on how to recover from a product update.
Unfortunately, assuming improvements have been made, recovery might not be until the next product reviews update is released.