Good morning, Search Marketer, and we've got a new search ranking algorithm update for you today.
Yesterday afternoon, Google launched a new ranking algorithm aimed at rewarding high-quality product review content. Google is calling it the Google product reviews update – yep, pretty straightforward.
"We know people appreciate product reviews that share in-depth research, rather than thin content that simply summarizes a bunch of products. That's why we're sharing an improvement to our ranking systems, which we call the product reviews update, that's designed to better reward such content," Google told us.
Here are some quick takeaways from this announcement:
- Name: Google Product Reviews Update
- Launched: April 8, 2021, at around 1pm ET
- Targets: It looks at product review content
- Penalty: It is not a penalty, it promotes or rewards "insightful analysis and original research."
- Not a core update: Many are going to say this is a core update, it is not.
- English Only: This is only looking at English-language content right now, this is a global launch but only for English content at this point.
- Impact: Google would not tell me what percentage of queries or searches were impacted by this update.
- Recover: If you were hit by this, then you will need to look at your content and see if you can do better. Check out Google's advice for better product reviews.
You can learn more about this update here.
Barry Schwartz,
Google algorithm review expert