Google has now completed rolling out the product reviews update that first began rolling out two weeks ago today, Danny Sullivan of Google told Search Engine Land.
“Caveat is with any update, you can still sometimes have some edge case lingering,” Sullivan explained. “But effectively done,” he said when it comes to the rollout of this new Google search ranking algorithm.
The confirmation. Here is the tweet from Danny Sullivan when I asked him if it was done rolling out.
Some more details. To catch you up, the Google products review update first launched on April 8, 2021. This is a new update, specifically looking at product review types of content, and it finished rolling out today, April 22, 2021.
The Google product reviews update aims to promote review content that is above and beyond much of the templated information you see on the web. Google said it will promote these types of product reviews in its search results rankings.
Google is not directly punishing lower quality product reviews that have “thin content that simply summarizes a bunch of products.” However, if you provide such content and find your rankings demoted because other content is promoted above yours, it will definitely feel like a penalty. Technically, according to Google, this is not a penalty against your content, Google is just rewarding sites with more insightful review content with rankings above yours.
This update should only impact product review content and not other types of content. The data providers said this was a big update, but not as big as a core update.
Why we care. Now is the time to check your sites to see if you were impacted by this update. If you do not write product review content, you likely did not feel anything from this update, but if you do write product reviews, you may have very well been impacted.
Google provided advice on what to do to help your product review content rank well with this update – you can read that advice in our original story.
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Source: IAB