Google November 2023 Reviews Update Rolling Out

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By Chris Barnhart Last updated Nov 9, 2023

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As expected, the Google November 2023 reviews update has started to roll out this week. It started on November 8, 2023 at about 12 pm ET. This will be the last time Google confirms a reviews update because it is now more of a regular update, compared to past reviews updates.

Google posted about the update on its search status dashboard saying, “Released the November 2023 reviews update. Learn more about how to write high quality reviews. Going forward, as the reviews system is now being improved at a regular and ongoing pace, we will no longer be posting about future updates on the status dashboard.”

Here is the tweet:

the November 2023 reviews update is also rolling out now (as per my last email: https://t.co/xny94FOVvn)

we’ll update the ranking release history page when the rollout is finished: https://t.co/hgjEkfpbA2

— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) November 8, 2023

Google told us last week that this specific update will “mark a point when we’ll no longer be giving periodic notifications of improvements to our reviews system, because they will be happening at a regular and ongoing pace.”

As a reminder, the last reviews update was a big one in that it no longer just impacted product reviews but also impacted products, services, and things in more general.

Google April 2023 Reviews Update Quick Facts

Here are the most important things that we know right now in short form:

• Name: Google November 2023 Reviews Update
• Launched: November 8, 2023 at around 12 pm ET
• Rollout: It will take about one to two weeks to roll out
• Targets: It looks at all review content, including products, services, destinations, games, movies, or other topics
• 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.

Several languages: English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Polish.

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

Documentation Updates

Google also tweaked some of its reviews system documentation page for this update. The changes include:

• Adding: “The reviews system is improved at a regular and ongoing pace.”
• Removed the words “and updates to it” from this line, “What does this system and updates to it mean for my site?”
• Removed this line: “Periodically, we improve how the reviews system works. When we do this in a notable way, we share this as a “reviews update” on our Google Search Status Dashboard.”
• Updating this line: “Content impacted by the reviews system may recover over time, if you’ve made improvements to your content. However, note that our automated assessment of review content is only one of many factors used in ranking content, so changes can happen at any time for various reasons.”

Other Updates

As you know, Google is currently rolling out the November 2023 core update which will take about two weeks to roll out and overlap with this update. That core update is super volatile and heated, so good luck figuring out which update hit you. Of course, the November core update hit hard already, but it was still pretty heated through yesterday.