Google Product Review Updates 2021: The Complete Story

Being the leading search engine, Google is always focusing on providing relevant answers to its users. It wants to present to the user the most up-to-date, and accurate answers for any query. People are now using Google for everything as they trust the search engine. One area where people often rely on Google is to get information on products. To read or to get reviews on a product, individuals search on Google for reliable answers.

Google is well aware of the impact of reviews for products as it helps a user form an opinion about a product and highly influences their buying decisions. Therefore, to aid an individual’s buying process, Google has introduced some updates regarding Product reviews. Read this article in full to get the complete information.

Google Product Review Update: April 8, 2021

Google Product Review update first came into effect on April 8, 2021, and its main intention was to reward genuine reviews that influence a buyer’s decision for a product. In an effort to improve product reviews, Google wanted to reward high-quality reviews that provide authentic information using which the buyer could make an informed decision on whether they should purchase a product or not.

Launched for the English language pages, it focused on producing rich content for product reviews. It offered several tips on what rich content could mean. Some of those tips are:

1. A content that explains how a product is different or better from other competitor companies of the same product.
2. Reviews that emphasize on expert product knowledge, if required.
3. Describes the benefits and drawbacks backed by research.
4. Defines the product physically, explains its operations, and is based more on actual use.

To read the complete Google document of this announcement click here.

Google Product Review Update: December 1, 2021

After the initial product review update, Google appended this update with two more measures. Based on user feedback for the initial update, Google informed the users that the December update will take three weeks to complete. The search engine added two more product review measures which are:

1. Provide physical evidence and experience of using the product. This can be through visuals, audio, or more than proves your actual experience with the product. It helps the user as well as Google to consider your review as genuine.
2. Including links to multiple product sellers so that the user can buy from their merchant of choice.

All the product review updates of the year are now included in a single document which you can access here.

The Impact

Any review website that’s focusing on producing fake reviews will suffer the consequence of these updates. With these updates, many reviews sites on the web saw their rankings change. On increasing volatility, a user asked John Mueller from Google if the update was just for English pages or other languages as well? John Mueller explained that it seems that this decision is across the board, meaning for all languages and regions and not just English. Here are the screenshots of the conversation:

Source: The conversation between a user and John Mueller regarding the language discrepancies of the Product Review Updates.

Yet after reading the screenshots of the conversation, you can figure out it seems unclear. It looks it was initially rolled out for English and will extend to other languages as well. It’s only something time will tell and even though, users are experiencing volatility in languages other than English, an official Google announcement awaits.