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Google Product Reviews Search Ranking Update

engine

10:45 am on Apr 9, 2021 (gmt 0)

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Google's Product Reviews Search ranking update is rolling out and is for English language reviews.

Google says "From this, we know people appreciate product reviews that share in-depth research, rather than thin content that simply summarizes a bunch of products."

For those creating content, here are some additional useful questions to consider in terms of product reviews. Do your reviews:

Express expert knowledge about products where appropriate?
Show what the product is like physically, or how it is used, with unique content beyond what’s provided by the manufacturer?
Provide quantitative measurements about how a product measures up in various categories of performance?
Explain what sets a product apart from its competitors?
Cover comparable products to consider, or explain which products might be best for certain uses or circumstances?
Discuss the benefits and drawbacks of a particular product, based on research into it?
Describe how a product has evolved from previous models or releases to provide improvements, address issues, or otherwise help users in making a purchase decision?
Identify key decision-making factors for the product's category and how the product performs in those areas? For example, a car review might determine that fuel economy, safety, and handling are key decision-making factors and rate performance in those areas.
Describe key choices in how a product has been designed and their effect on the users beyond what the manufacturer says?

[developers.google.com...]

jcjchung

11:57 am on Apr 9, 2021 (gmt 0)

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Any examples of winners and losers?

RedBar

12:16 pm on Apr 9, 2021 (gmt 0)

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Google says "From this, we know people appreciate product reviews that share in-depth research,

In that case G, why not do them youself and save the rest of us from being scraped by you?

lammert

12:44 pm on Apr 9, 2021 (gmt 0)

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Between the lines of these recommendations I read that they will reward reviews which contain information not found anywhere else on the internet. So no scraping and rephrasing of existing websites but original research. My understanding was that Google already used this as their base ranking method since Panda, E-A-T and YMYL, so what has changed?

RedBar

2:24 pm on Apr 9, 2021 (gmt 0)

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It wants new and unique stuff to scrape for itself!

lammert

2:37 pm on Apr 9, 2021 (gmt 0)

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Yep, that's the goal of a search engine. If you don't like it, just block Googlebot in your robots.txt. But you can't have your cake and eat it too, i.e. your organic traffic will go to zero.

superclown2

7:52 am on Apr 10, 2021 (gmt 0)

I used to have a stack of very successful sites that fitted this specification to a T. They all got manual penalties as 'spam'.

One site that was packed with data that had taken me weeks to put together had the penalty lifted, but only if I removed an affiliate link. That showed me the true reason for the penalty - it wasn't the quality of the site but the fact that it was a competitor for advertising money that was the issue.

I checked an important niche this morning - some of the sites in there have many pages of unique information. The number one site for the main search term? A high advertising price comparison site with a page of boilerplate content. Three other similar sites are in the top ten. Sorry nine, there is no room for ten listings with all the irrelevant clutter.

Forgive me if I treat Google's claims of 'improvements' with indifference.

JS_Harris

1:38 pm on Apr 11, 2021 (gmt 0)

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Good advice but...
- Google is updating how THEY use content

Is there a tag which I can include on a page to allow google to scrape the generic info but to block them from the rest and save the "extra" for real visitors? I feel like it's becoming counter-intuitive to serve up my content on Google when two-thirds of those digesting it never leave Google. My bottom line isn't jumping nearly as well as Google's of late.

It wouldn't mean doom to traffic levels, Google can still gauge and rank based on user metrics without swallowing up the content and visitors. It might be refreshing to write sections for visitors with no care of SEO.

christianz

7:06 pm on Apr 14, 2021 (gmt 0)

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Yep, that's the goal of a search engine. If you don't like it, just block Googlebot

Noup. It's a monopoly. It's a dictate. Google is the gatekeeper of Internet. If you don't surrender your content to Google, nobody will ever discover your site, because they control the operating system (half of it on mobile), the web browser and the default search engine, which doesn't even invite you to enter web domains, but wants you to "search" right away.

There is no escape, no choice to "opt out" for the webmaster (without destroying all traffic) and no free market for search engines.

airship

4:01 pm on Nov 15, 2021 (gmt 0)

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Any recent updates from site owners months after this update rolled out?

I had sites that were ranking top 3 for a variety of "Best PRODUCT for this purpose" types of searches, which fell past the first page after this update.