Google's latest product reviews update sparks increased volatility in web traffic

Source: © Oleksandr Ppidvalnyi pexels Google’s latest product reviews update has sparked an increase in the volatility in web traffic

While Google’s product reviews updates will occur periodically throughout the year, the February 2023 product reviews update has caused a bit more volatility across the open web than usual.

SEO expert Barry Schwartz reported in Search Engine Round Table that this latest product reviews update has caused significant traffic turbulence across the web, resulting in major ranking shifts in search results.

The SEO community has been abuzz with discussions about the impact of this update, which appears to be more far-reaching than previous product reviews updates.

According to Google’s official announcement, the update applies to sites across the globe in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, and Polish. The rollout could take up to two weeks to complete.

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15 Feb 2023

Product review aim

Product reviews updates aim to provide users with more accurate, trustworthy, and helpful product reviews when they search for a specific product or service. It is important stay up to speed with Google's algorithm updates and changesto protect your web traffic.

Google product reviews updates are designed to reward websites that publish high-quality, detailed, and informative product reviews, while simultaneously penalising websites that publish spammy, low-quality, and/or fake reviews.

The updates may include changes to ranking factors used by Google to evaluate product reviews, changes to its guidelines for product reviews, and other changes to its search algorithm.

Google first launched the product reviews update in April 2021. In that announcement, Google said the update aimed to favour product reviews with in-depth research instead of “thin content that simply summarises a bunch of products”.

This update is not a core update, but rather an ongoing effort to specifically optimise product reviews in search results.

Since it first launched, Google has rolled out additional product reviews updates in December 2021, March 2022, July 2022, and September 2022.
The best thing you can do to ensure your site is ready for any Google product reviews update is to review Google’s product reviews guidelines to make sure your content meets Google’s high standards for quality reviews.

Also, Google notes that using structured data may help its crawler identify product reviews, which can be helpful for indexing.