Google April 2023 Reviews Update
Now To Include Products Services and More!

Released on 12th April 2023, Google 2023 reviews update has announced that it will also evaluate the reviews for services, destination, games, movies, and other topics with the same parameters that were earlier used to evaluate and reward high quality reviews.

*Image reference: Tweet Link

Google has updated their review documentation and the changes can be seen reflected in the following two places: 

• Documentation: Review Update
• Guidance Article: Write High Quality Reviews

Primarily, Google has altered the language of these documents to ensure they’ll now evaluate products, services, destinations, and more using the same parameters.  One major change includes the name of the system, it was changed from “products review system” to “review system”  This change can also be seen reflected in the heading for the review updated documentations: 

Old: Google Search’s product reviews system and your website

Updated: Google Search’s reviews system and your website

Dr Marie Haynes, an SEO Specialist shares a side by side comparison of the old and updated product review documentation that now focuses on more than products, it includes services, destinations and more!

Let’s go  through the major changes: 

1st Notable Modification: Modified “product reviews” to “reviews” and inclusion of different topics.

Old Guidelines: Publishing high quality product reviews on your ecommerce or product review site can help shoppers learn more about a product before a purchase. 

Updated Guidelines: Publishing high quality reviews can help people learn more about things they are considering, such as products, services, destinations, games, movies or other topics. 

Throughout the document, you’ll notice they have removed the places where the review system simply focused on “products” and replaced it with words like  thing or something. Or it has been simply removed and the sentence has been modified to include other topics.

2nd Notable Modification: Modified “shoppers” to “people”

Throughout the content the word shoppers has been replaced with people to cover the comprehensive nature of the review system.

3rd Notable Modifications: Addition of new guidance for reviews:

As, you can see, Google has offered clarification on the type of review content  it evaluates:

What does the review system evaluate?

Content written with the goal of providing a recommendation, giving an opinion, or providing analysis.

What does it not evaluate?

Third party reviews. For example, the ones posted by users in the reviews section of a service or product page.
This update is important for website owners who publish any type of review content. The update might also have an effect on their ranking as Google evaluates the reviews published on their website.