Google updates its algorithms around 500 to 600 times each year, thats almost twice per day. However, every now and then they announce major updates to one of their algorithms and panic ensues among the search engine optimization community along with the rush to be the first to tell you what the algorithm update is about and how to handle it in order to not hurt your rankings.
This is a timeline of Google algorithms.
This year, Google announced a major product review update on April 8. However, it was effectively rolled out on April 22, 2021. This years product review update emphasizes the quality of review type content and its need to meet User Intent, an important factor to keep in mind for beginner SEOs as well as seasoned experts.
This update does not directly penalize low-quality, thin content, but it does reward valuable content that delivers insightful information that helps users make better decisions. In a way, sites with stale or low-quality content might suffer a kind of penalty when theyre pushed down in the SERP.
Not as impressive as the Google core update, this update only checks content that qualifies as a product review, and nothing else. What this means is that youll need to refresh your content if you run a product review website, for example. Most other types of websites dont have to worry about it.
Google has also provided noteworthy tips to help website owners understand what kind of product content ranks better with this update. This update is another effort of Google to help websites that are invested in producing rich and useful content that meets the expectations of the users.
This update is not related to Googles usual core update. It seems to lean more towards emphasizing authority, expertise, and trust. If you run a website that has product review type content, focus on producing high-quality content that satisfies your users real intent; sane advice for all content in general.
Google gives the following advice if you run a website that publishes product reviews:
As you can see, focusing on giving your users the most useful product review possible is all you need to do, or hopefully keep doing, to rank (or continue to rank) in the first positions of search results even after Googles 2021 product review update.
The rollout of the update lasted about two weeks, but the bulk update was rolled out in the first couple of days and some sites started seeing fluctuations almost right away.
Several data companies tracking Googles search results agree that looking at the data from search results, this update will not have as big of an impact as the last core update in December 2020. As we said before, those most affected (positively and negatively) by this update are websites that publish product review-type content.
This passage ranking update was estimated to impact 7% of the queries. This is basically a new way of Google to rank specific passages from a website in the search results.
Passage indexing, or passage ranking, is a way for Google to rank specific sentences from a webpage by better understanding the relevancy they have for the specific search and serve the user the most useful and specific answer possible.
Heres a screenshot from Twitter of the announcement:
This update has more to do with how Google understands passages than anything else. What this means for SEOs is pretty much nothing. As always, your focus should continue to be on producing high-quality insightful content.
This update was rolled out last year, however, it was an important update and is worth mentioning a few details.
This update was technically the third largest named core update, and its impact was similar in measure to the May 2020 Core Update and the August 2018 Medic Update. Heres a screenshot of the official tweet about the update:
After putting all the data together, the evidence shows that this update mostly impacted big websites with content that lacked relevance and authority.
After the dust has settled once an update is rolled out, its time to gather the data and see if it affected you. If it did, or you just need to boost your sites performance, consider the following quick tips:
Google is always looking to serve the most relevant content to each user. This means that old content will get left behind. Remember that everyone is creating new content constantly, so look for relevant and useful ways to update new content by adding the most recent information and other valuable assets such as video, graphics, new stats, etc.
Create content that is relevant to your audience by listening to what they are saying and what theyre looking for. Publish new content on a regular basis to keep your audience engaged and improve their user experience. Google loves this and rewards it in the SERP.
Be on the lookout for new trends and platforms that pop up all the time. Dont jump on whatever is hot at the moment, but analyze whether your audience is there or not and decide how to incorporate that into your content strategy.
Your link profile involves the quantity and quality of links pointing back to your website. Regularly audit these links to find those that could be toxic and other issues such as Nofollows or lost links. Dont forget to also evaluate your internal linking structure for optimal crawling and user experience.
Apply all these practical tips to help your website recover traffic and be ready for the next time Google rolls out another broad core update or any other type of update.
