The September 2022 product reviews update ran from 20 to 26 September 2022, taking 6 days. It began eight days after the September 2022 core update started and overlapped with it for six days. Two confirmed rollouts running simultaneously on a review site is the hardest attribution problem in the whole series.
Overlapping with a core update
| Update | Dates | Measurement (overlap) |
|---|---|---|
| September 2022 core update | 12 to 26 Sep 2022 | Ended the same day |
| September 2022 product reviews update | 20 to 26 Sep 2022 | Overlapped for 6 days |
Both finished on 26 September, so there is no window in which one ran alone after the other. A review site that dropped in that fortnight cannot resolve this from dates under any circumstances.
Resolving it by scope instead
- Only review and roundup pages fell: the reviews update. Non-review content holding steady is the giveaway.
- Everything fell proportionally: the core update, which reassesses the whole site rather than one content type.
- Review pages fell much harder while others slipped slightly: both, which was the most common outcome and needs both fixes in sequence.
The page scope analyzer answers this from a comparison export in about a minute, and it lists the pages that gained as well as those that lost, which is usually the fastest route to the answer.
The autumn 2022 sequence
This was the third confirmed rollout in five weeks. The August helpful content update ran 25 August to 9 September, the core update 12 to 26 September, and this one 20 to 26 September. For an affiliate site, essentially the whole of that period was contaminated.
The last clean baseline before the sequence is the four weeks ending 24 August 2022. Search Console retains only 16 months, so that data is long gone from the default view and has to come from an archive if you kept one.
Autumn 2022 was three rollouts in five weeks
Attribution from dates is impossible there, so it has to be done from scope. Send your Search Console access and I will work out what moved.
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Traffic dropped around Sep 20, 2022?
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