Product reviews update and your site  |  Google Search Central Blog

Monday, 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.
• Include links to multiple sellers to give the reader the option to purchase
  from their merchant of choice.

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.

Posted by Perry Liu, Software Engineer,
Jianfei Zhu, Software Engineer, and
Alan Kent, Developer Advocate