Good morning, Search Marketer,
It has been about a week since the Google product reviews update started rolling out and I wanted to give you an update on what type of impact it's had. Sometimes updates like these can take time to be visible to the SEO industry but this one showed its face early on. Based on early reports, SEOs saw an impact as early as the day after the update.
Plus, this update crossed all sectors: health, finance, e-commerce, blogs, technology, trade businesses, and so on. Many sites with product review content on them saw huge gains or huge losses. Some reported losses as much as 50% or higher in terms of Google organic traffic, and yes, that is similar to a core update. The industry chatter, a term I use for when the SEO community starts to come out of the woodworks to talk about how much they lost after a Google update, was pretty high relative to normal days, and the automated tracking tools reported high volatility. I summed up a lot of this on my personal blog but I am tracking it and hope to have a bigger report on Search Engine Land in the upcoming week or so.
What did we learn new since this update was announced?
- The rollout of this update will take about two weeks, so we still have a week to go.
- This update can impact your Google Discover traffic, just like a core update might.
- Google will do refreshes periodically but will not announce all of these refreshes
- User generated content likely won't rank well for product reviews anymore
Barry Schwartz,
Google product reviews reporter
