Google has confirmed that the March 2022 product reviews update is now finished rolling out. This update has officially completed rolling out over a 19 day period, first being kicked off on March 23, 2022.

The announcement. “The Google product review update is fully rolled out. Thank you!” Google’s Alan Kent wrote on Twitter.

March 2022 product reviews update. As a reminder, the March 2022 product reviews update started to roll out at about 12:00pm ET on March 23, 2022. This update took 19 days to roll out after it was announced. So this update started on March 23, 2022 and lasted through April 11, 2022.

Big update. This update was not as big as the December 2021 update, based on data from the data providers.

Why we care. If your website offers product review content, you will want to check your rankings to see if you were impacted. Did your Google organic traffic improve, decline or stay the same?

Long term, you are going to want to ensure that going forward, that you put a lot more detail and effort into your product review content so that it is unique and stands out from the competition on the web.

The SEO community. The March 2022 product reviews update seemed to have a slow start, with some volatility as early as March 23rd but then most of the volatility showed up on March 31st. I was able to cover the community reaction in one blog post on the Search Engine Roundtable. It includes some of the early chatter, ranking charts and social shares from some SEOs. In short, if your site was hit by this update, you probably felt it in a very big way but this was not as widespread as the December update in terms of the chatter within the community.

What to do if you are hit. Google has given advice on what to consider if you are negatively impacted by this product reviews update. We posted that advice in our original story over here. In addition, Google provided two new best practices around this update, one saying to provide more multimedia around your product reviews and the second is to provide links to multiple sellers, not just one. Google posted these two items:

Google added the following criteria for what matters with the March 2022 product reviews update:

Google added three new points of new advice for this third-release of the products reviews update:

Google product reviews update. The Google product reviews update aims to promote review content that is above and beyond much of the templated information you see on the web. Google said it will promote these types of product reviews in its search results rankings.

Google is not directly punishing lower quality product reviews that have “thin content that simply summarizes a bunch of products.” However, if you provide such content and find your rankings demoted because other content is promoted above yours, it will definitely feel like a penalty. Technically, according to Google, this is not a penalty against your content, Google is just rewarding sites with more insightful review content with rankings above yours.

Technically, this update should only impact product review content and not other types of content.

Source: Search Engine Land

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