There is no such thing as a "G product review algo update". The fact that G explicitly mentioned this so called update will take 3 weeks to roll out.....really(?) is because they can not lie about it or deny it as every major SEO tool will see the obvious stats for that 3 week period. I can see the weird stats also very clearly.

This so called update is just a 3 week squeeze during the highest e-commerce turnover of the year for many businesses(or should be). They just label it an algo update while G is closing nearly all useful traffic and keeping it inside their own environment. If this works as G intends than you can expect such a squeeze during more seasonal periods with higher than usual turnover.

If you think about it, how is G even going to be able to evaluate all the new rules for product reviews that they described in their new "how to write product reviews" guide? Any thin content website can easily circumvent this and make their thin content reviews look like very extensive quality reviews (not going to give any actual methods here!). But I am sure many of them are already at work in "repairing" their thin content websites.

All the usual items G has placed on the first page of the serps like "people also ask etc...etc..) are a passive kind of squeeze on organic traffic. This latest "product reviews" update is an actual active squeeze where G literally closes the traffic faucet for entire regions and industries during the best period of the year. This is not paranoia, this is real....data does not lie.

All the usual items G has placed on the first page of the serps like "people also ask etc...etc..) are a passive kind of squeeze on organic traffic. This latest "product reviews" update is an actual active squeeze where G literally closes the traffic faucet for entire regions and industries during the best period of the year. This is not paranoia, this is real....data does not lie.

@Dooku This is speculation on your part. I speculate that Google does this all year long, not just at holidays! Traffic patterns that used to be more steady now swing wildly hour by hour...the peaks are the same but the troughs are reduced to almost zero at some hours...that was never the case before Google started throttling traffic like crazy and adding so much crap to the page on the fly.

My USA traffic is perpetually under assault, there are very few days where either the home page or most important landing pages of my site receive good traffic at the same time...one always seems to mysteriously drop. And the international traffic from Canada, Australia, and Western Europe (read: rich countries with actual customers) swings wildly now...one day normal, the next gone completely.

Finally, and the worst thing IMHO...the traffic you do get is not the same quality. It produces no inquiries and no conversions. The inquiries I get now are from clueless people with low budgets who don't even read what's on the page and ask stupid questions...sometimes I just delete them without responding. I would love to know how Google is managing that...but I guess if you have a trillion dollar MONOPOLY it's not that hard.

We all know why they are doing this and why now. This is something you'd expect from a heartless tyrant like Jean-Emanuel Baptiste Zorg. Fire one million.
[youtu.be...]

Can we call the period of November / December of armageddon for the ecommerce (Eu market) ? clearly yes ....

Rest assured the USA is also participating in this Armageddon event as well. I suspect small ecommerce sites, which are heavily dependent on Google, will start dropping like flies in the first quarter of 2022. The big national and international brands will easily absorb the added sales from less consumer choice by pushing more high margin goods produced in low wage countries with few worker protections.

They just label it an algo update while G is closing nearly all useful traffic and keeping it inside their own environment.

In our industry it seems Google is attempting to keep buyer traffic within the Big Tech/Big Box club. Many buyer intent keywords are loaded with Amazon product pages, Amazon category pages and Amazon affiliate websites at the top while big national brands are sprinkled in beneath. To view small business offerings, including small specialized businesses, one must go to page 2 or even 3. Just like previous updates spanning a period of years, I don't see anything positive for small businesses who sell goods as even paid traffic from Google performs poorly. How Google names these updates really doesn't matter anymore because I see it as lip service for updates that are simply focused on harvesting more money out of economies.

It's crazy to see this phenomenon of "valve" on a large scale in small e-commerce. Literally, after a certain hour you get the impression that "someone" is cutting the juice. And surprisingly, this happens at a time when historical statistics show high conversion rates.
This phenomenon combined with the abnormal movements in the SERP for several weeks (you can check semrush sensor by example) confirms the theory that google is able to manipulate the SERP to adapt it to the search intent in its favor (ads clicks, google shopping etc..). Let's bet on a strong increase of Alphabet's financial results in the last quarter of 2021...

I believe google PR made a mistake. This is the real core update. The product review update must have been the first update they rolled out and then the core update.

I saw that many had old errors resurface in the console. Because they are known in the community (as opposed to many others) google said they are looking into it. There is nothing to look into. It happened to me every time during a major update, not only core.

SEMrush sensors through the roof again in the UK...

@BushyTop - Hopefully a roll back on this ridiculous crap.

I've been seeing big shifts since Saturday. That just pulls you down...

@Jez123 I hope so too.

Extremely low traffic levels across all sites for me this morning however this was normal until Xmas 2019 plus being the run-up to this Friday's two week closedown for Xmas and New Year in my widget sector.

It'll be a rollercoaster for me until week commencing 10th January 2022 similar to many other industries, realistically it's a don't take any notice of what's happening time!

Also seeing very low traffic...USA was down 72% early this morn, now down 54% at 11am. Also a loss of 10 top three ranking terms. Every day wild swings now

Hopefully a roll back on this ridiculous crap.

If there's any "roll" to what's going on, I'd call it a long drawn out steam roll - flattening traffic and squashing sales for us smaller sellers at the most critical time for many who depend on holiday sales for a substantial portion of their yearly revenue.

I'm also seeing substantially lower traffic from Google today. However, Google's same abysmal traffic quality remains consistent for our small but specialized ecommerce website with 100% unique content and products not sold elsewhere.

Google is still crawling (scanning) old order success pages as well with a variety of order numbers. Gbot correctly identifies itself and the IP addresses used by Google are indeed theirs, so I can rule out spoofing. These pages aren't linked to internally or externally and will generate the same "order received" page regardless of what numbers/characters are entered - including order numbers that have yet to be generated. Google first starts with /checkout/order-received/XXXXXXX which is then 301 redirected to a properly formatted /checkout/order-received/XXXXXXX/ order success page with the trailing slash. Meta noindex is present on all of these pages. I'm still trying to get a handle on why Google is doing this and using random numbers.

We've seen a nice 10% jump this past 3 days vs. previous week (20% vs. the week before). Informational site with lots of UGC. Hard to unpick seasonal variation, but does look good. Perhaps because G knows we'd never pay for ads?

On Monday my global site came in at 75.7% even though both US and India traffic was down on average, Germany was surprisingly higher. Today, after half my Googleday, I'm at precisely 50% with India well ahead so far. I expect Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday ought to be about average ... hopefully.

All my UK-focused sites are well down by 50% minimum including the hotel / pub which has taken an extra hit thanks solely to new "Covid" measures, restaurant cancellations have been horrific with it now having to make massive re-adjustments to intended purchases and staffing levels.

Not to get off topic, but these SERP "upsets" are a perfect example of the contempt G has for those who provide its content. Surprisingly destructive and punitive action from a progressive company that alledgedly values things like economic equality. Smh.

With the recent proliferation of 3x video ads and ridiculous PPC rates, I'll predict a quarterly report in the 60 billion range. Its draining massive amounts of money from the entire economy, all for itself. Smdh

the contempt G has for those who provide its content.

But all those of us who have been around for more than 5 minutes know that G is simply the modern form of classified ads, our sites are merely the filler for their pages to look like a trustworthy publication, G is simply a paid-for ad-server.

I know you know that, the explation is for those who do not.

The thing is though that G does still provide some good honest answers when drilled into for those who know how to search.

@redbar - well sure, but where did they get their info? that's right, they harvested it from their content providers...us. Assimilate and then remove or down-rank the source. Wait until AI content duplication takes the top...oops, it's already happening. I have no less than six obvious AI-generated sites in my own niche producing AI webspam...and winning.

@samwest ... Purely in casual friends' conversations many people these days seem to be word-of-mouth recommendations or well-established brands both local and national.

Uk e-commerce site here. All 3rd party tools such as Ahrefs and semrush are showing a big spike in traffic and in particular keywords. In reality google have absolutely nailed us starting yesterday around 2pm UK time. Traffic seems weirdly stable, however conversions are at our lowest point with just 2 in the last 24 hours. In a week we do around 100 sales. So we are currently on course for 14 if things stay like this. Will update if we see any changes/rollbacks

@Jmh90 - That's interesting that you got nailed yesterday. You are seeing exactly what I have been seing since late November. Though traffic is on the low side it's not out of the ordinary but every conversion is like pulling all of my teeth out. I dread to think what post Christmas will bring.

My USA traffic has been weak since December 3rd. My clicks in GSC dropped off a cliff and are now at a much lower level, even though impressions have not dropped. My own site analytics show less of a drop, perhaps -15% daily. This is by far the worst Oct-Dec period I have seen in years, with the exception of 2020. Has anyone else seen this?

@ ichthyous - yes, this is exactly what I am seeing but in UK

On my side I have not seen a drop in traffic since December 3rd (EU Market) but only an abysmal drop in conversions ...At least this observation was valid until today when I noticed a 64% drop in traffic on one of the e-commerce that I follow! never seen (no position drop...) and even if this is temporary (it's all I can hope for given the state of excitement of the sensor semrush), the impact on businesses affected is catastrophic, it's a shame to release an update so impacting in the middle of the chrismas period....very confusing

Feels like something big happened today. I was having minor improvements the past couple of days and then today we had a fairly significant drop. This update seems to be much bigger than the most recent "core update" they released. This "product reviews" update seems to go way beyond products because the losses we took today have nothing to do with products whatsoever.

Traffic went up 20+% on Dec 10, but dropped down 35% on Dec 15. Definitely some big thing happened today. I saw several people reporting big drop the same day.

SEMrush 8.2 AGAIN?! (UK). This is just #*$! mad.

Looks like something new is being rolled out. What I learned about these updates is that even when your site or sites benefit from a certain update it will not last for a long time. If you happened to receive a huge boost make sure to capitalize it in any way you can because it will end soon. It can be a day, a week or a few months down the road.

For those of you seeing big movements, in which general widget sector are you?

I'm seeing nothing except for the usual small shuffling around in positions 4-10.

Huge drop this morning...