Google is no longer just looking at product reviews. Google’s review system is now evaluating reviews about services, media and other topics.
Google regularly updates its search algorithms to improve the quality and relevance of its search results. These updates are designed to reward websites that provide high-quality content and a good user experience while penalizing those that use spammy or manipulative tactics to manipulate search rankings.
Google released the Google April 2023 Reviews Update on, April 12, 2023 at noon EST (9 AM PDT). This update leans heavily on signals of experience.
To ensure that your website is well-positioned for any future algorithm updates, it’s important to focus on creating high-quality, user-focused content that meets the needs of your target audience. This includes conducting thorough keyword research, optimizing your website structure and navigation, and building high-quality backlinks from relevant and authoritative sources.
Considering that Google calls this algorithm their Reviews System, it may be useful to think about this update as an update to one algorithm among many algorithms that are collectively known as Google’s Algorithm.
Signals of Product Reviews Experience
The new update might look for following signals of experience:
– Visual evidence
– Audio
– Links to evidence of experience Quantitative measurements
Those signals of experience are evidence that the product has been handled, tested, used and measured.
The latest update has set higher standards for product reviews. It is possible that lower quality reviews could still appear in search results if there are no higher quality reviews available. However, this does not necessarily indicate that the Reviews System is ineffective; it could simply reflect the overall quality of the available product reviews.
Google added some new guidance:
“The reviews system is designed to evaluate articles, blog posts, pages or similar first-party standalone content written with the purpose of providing a recommendation, giving an opinion, or providing analysis. It does not evaluate third-party reviews, such as those posted by users in the reviews section of a product or services page.
Reviews can be about a single thing, or head-to-head comparisons, or ranked-lists of recommendation
ns. Reviews can be about any topic. There can be reviews of products such as laptops or winter jackets, pieces of media such as movies or video games, or services and businesses such as restaurants or fashion brands.“
Previous product review updates. Google’s latest update on product reviews marks an evolution of its ongoing series of updates, which began in 2021 and has seen six iterations so far. As part of this latest update, Google has consolidated all its previous guidance on the “product reviews” update into its revised guidance on “reviews” as a whole.
Here’s a timeline of all Google’s past product reviews updates:
- Google February 2023 product reviews update
- Google September 2022 product reviews update
- Google July 2022 product reviews update
- Google March 2022 product reviews update
- Google December 2021 product reviews update
- Google April 2021 product reviews algorithm update