Google has confirmed that the December 2021 product reviews update has finished rolling out. This update was completed a few days before Christmas.
### The Announcement
“The Google product review update is fully rolled out. Thank you!” Google’s Alan Kent wrote on Twitter.
### December 2021 Product Reviews Update
As a reminder, the December 2021 product reviews update started to roll out at about 12:30 pm ET on December 1, 2021. This update took 20 days to complete, ending on December 21, 2021.
### Impact and Community Response
Based on initial data, this update was significant. It was larger than the April 2021 product reviews update and remained quite volatile throughout the entire rollout. The community chatter and tracking tools indicated high levels of activity consistently over the past few weeks.
### Why It Matters
If your website offers product review content, you should check your rankings to see how you were impacted. Evaluate whether your Google organic traffic improved, declined, or stayed the same. Long term, you’ll want to ensure that you put more detail and effort into your product review content to make it unique and competitive.
### SEO Community Reaction
The December 2021 product reviews update was felt more acutely than the April version. The SEO community had substantial reactions, with numerous discussions, ranking charts, and social shares. If your site was affected by this update, you likely noticed a significant impact.
### Advice for Affected Sites
Google has provided guidelines for those negatively impacted by this product reviews update. Google’s advice includes offering more multimedia elements in your product reviews and providing links to multiple sellers. Specifically:
– Provide visuals, audio, or other links demonstrating your experience with the product to support your expertise and authenticity.
– Include links to multiple sellers to give readers purchasing options from different merchants.
### Google Product Reviews Update Aim
The Google product reviews update aims to promote high-quality review content that offers more depth than standard templated information. Google intends to highlight these comprehensive reviews in search results.
While lower-quality product reviews with “thin content” may see reduced rankings because more insightful content is promoted, this is not considered a direct punishment by Google. The focus is on rewarding higher-quality reviews.
### Impact on Content
This update should primarily impact product review content and not other types of web content.
### More on Google Updates
This year, numerous confirmed and unconfirmed updates were rolled out by Google. Key updates include the July 2021 core update, Google MUM, and various spam updates in June and November. There were also core updates in June and July, the Google page experience update, the predator algorithm update, and others.
### Previous Core Updates
The November 2021 core update was the most recent significant update, finishing on November 30, 2021. Prior to that, there were updates in July and June 2021, which had varying impacts and rollout speeds. The December 2020 core update was very significant, followed by the May 2020 core update. January 2020 and September 2019 core updates showed differing levels of impact. Google also released a specific local rankings update in November.
For more insight into past Google updates, you can review previous changes and their impacts on various sites.
