Wednesday, December 1, 2021
Back in April 2021, we shared a product reviews update that was designed to promote high quality product reviews. We are now rolling out a new update, the first major update since April, that may change how your product reviews rank in search results. In particular, if you have made positive changes to your content, you may see that improvement reflected as part of this latest release. However, note that our automated assessment of product review content is only one of many factors used in ranking content, so changes can happen at any time for various reasons.
Over time we have received more feedback from users on what type of review content is deemed trustworthy and useful, motivating us to provide additional product review guidance. Users have told us that they trust reviews with evidence of products actually being tested, and prefer to have more options to purchase the product.
Therefore we are introducing two new best practices for product reviews, to take effect in a future update.
- Provide evidence such as visuals, audio, or other links of your own experience with the product, to support your expertise and reinforce the authenticity of your review.
- Consider including links to multiple sellers to give the reader the option to purchase from their merchant of choice, if it makes sense for your site.
These best practices, combined with the best practices shared back in April, have now been merged into a single documentation page, Write high quality product reviews.
For additional advice on creating great content or questions on the product review best practices, please check out Google Search Central help pages and our public forums.