Recovering from February 2023 Products Review Update

befrchmumopa

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We are a "Top10BestProductReviews.nl" site in the Netherlands that only worked the bottom of the funnel. We only published money posts and were making good money until the February 2023 Products Review Update. We have lost about 70% of our traffic in a few weeks time (and we deserve it).

We are now working on creating more top of the funnel (ToFu) and middle of the funnel (MoFu) content than bottom of the funnel (BoFu). But we're concerned that our website is 'burned' in the eyes of Google. Is it better to abandon the website and start over with new websites (niches) that have a good mix of ToFu, MoFu and BoFu articles. Or is it possible to recover our current site by pruning content (reducing BoFu content) and publishing ToFu and MoFu content?
 
Recovering is possible, it's all just an algorithm. It's not like they've decided they just don't like your site!

That being said, it can be hard to put in a lot of work and just hope it makes a difference without seeing results. I'm going through the same thing right now.

Depending on the lost income, I'd say it's worth doing a good number of things to help the site, but plan it out. Only do the critical stuff and don't drive yourself crazy on it. Figure out all the reasons you might have been hit, fix them, then wait and see what happens.

Of course, it may also be that the BoFu content itself isn't up to scratch. If your reviews are just rinse and repeat roundups of products you don't actually have experience with, THAT might be the problem. Not needing more info content.
 
We're also going through the Kitchen Sink Method to make sure we didn't miss anything else aside from the BoFu content. But the steep decline of traffic starting on the same day as the rollout of the February Product Review Update makes me believe that it's more BoFu related.
Of course I'm not 100% objective but the quality of our BoFu content is easily among top 3 of our competitors in our geopgraphy. All content is written by real experts based on online research, but we don't actually test products in our lists (but nobody does in our geopgraphy).
 
MinstrelJunkie said:
Recovering is possible, it's all just an algorithm. It's not like they've decided they just don't like your site!
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Technically it would be possible to just add a flag to a website and "burn it".

That flag could have all kinds of obstacles to be lifted, such as time passing or simply requiring a multiple of trust signals, that other sites wouldn't.

This was the way Google used to operate with Panda and particularly Penguin, where it was an actual site wide penalty, that took years to get lifted.

It had some side effects in that it could wipe out businesses, which I think they stopped doing, because it would risk taking out some of their largest customers and "trusted sources" as well.

It would make perfect sense to "permanently", or at least long-lasting, punish some sites to make an example. It would require having a very high certainty that a site was low quality though.

MinstrelJunkie said:
Of course, it may also be that the BoFu content itself isn't up to scratch. If your reviews are just rinse and repeat roundups of products you don't actually have experience with, THAT might be the problem. Not needing more info content.
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I would definitely consider this as the most likely cause, since this is what Google has explicitly stated and because the SERPs are full of very low quality "roundup reviews" from big name sites, which contribute absolutely nothing to a buying decision.
 
I agree with the fellers above. If you got hit by the Product Reviews update, then you need to look at your product reviews. Yes, Google tweaks a lot of stuff during these named updates that have nothing to do with the names, but they're generally focused on the target, which is what the name usually is.

You've described your product reviews already as: "All content is written by real experts based on online research, but we don't actually test products in our lists (but nobody does in our geopgraphy)."

This is precisely the kind of content they're targeting. They want to see that you had hands-on experience with the products and bring insights to the table that don't exist elsewhere. That likely means new images but there's other ways they must be determining that you actually had the product in-house. Like "I, me, my" language and any verbiage that denotes direct experience: "I liked this, I disliked that, this part annoyed me, this part made me so excited" and so forth.

They're pretty explicit about what they expect these days. The amount of transparency is surprising. They don't tell you how to do it or how they rank it, but they tell you what they want to see. I really recommend reading this page of theirs: Write high quality product reviews.

Here's some points from it, just as an example:

Evaluate the product from a user's perspective.
That's what I was saying about "I, me, mine, my opinion" language.

Demonstrate that you are knowledgeable about the products reviewed – show you are an expert.
Now we're talking about EEAT signals. Does your author box and about page describe your expertise and why you should be trusted in the niche? Is there evidence of this off of your own site?

Provide evidence such as visuals, audio, or other links of your own experience with the product
Again, are there pictures and video of you handling the object? I'd go as far as to ONLY include those images and not brand-offered product images that everyone uses.

Beyond that, as you keep reading the list, they basically tell you how to write a good review. Pros, cons, qualitative ratings, quantitative measurements, comparisons to other options, what are the alternatives out there, how does the new version compare and differ from previous models. And still it goes on further. They basically give you an outline of how to write it and what to do.

If you reviews do not look and sound like is being described on that link, that's why you got hit.

You may be thinking "Well, when I search the keywords the guys above me don't have all that stuff", and yeah, it sucks. Google is currently sliding back towards the vindictive punishing mode, in my opinion, and it doesn't hit everyone at the same time. It seems to be rolling out in waves to not only sectors of each industry but groups in the industry at a time. And it doesn't just seem to be "well you lost some positive weightings with this algorithm variable" so much as "here's a punishing filter placed on you until you make the changes and a solid year or more has passed and we trust you again."

And your question was whether you should start over. I don't think the domain is burned, but if you have 100+ reviews and no possibility of buying them all and reviewing them, then starting over either on a new domain or on the same domain after deleting any existing reviews you won't expand upon is probably a good idea. But even then on the same domain, the problem is likely to follow you until the next product reviews update, seeing as it's likely a negative filter placed on you that can be lifted once the old reviews are gone. That makes you wonder if you should even redirect those pages anywhere. It's a pretty big shit show.

If I wanted to continue down that path, I'd be thinking about deleting reviews except once I wanted to beef up, and not 301-ing the other ones since there's not going to be relevant pages and I don't want that negative signal following me around, and then publishing new reviews that meet the new expectations. If there isn't a lot of link equity, I'd consider starting over on a new domain. But I'd even ask if it's worth my time any more. It technically should be easier to rank since there's going to be a lot less competition moving forward, but the competition that remains is going to be a lot more fierce in terms of the time and money they can spend to meet these expectations.
 
@Ryuzaki Would you agree that overall authority still trumps EEAT?

I think those at most risk for this kind of punishment are sites that are relatively weaker in links and age.

Almost all of the page 1 roundup reviews in the .com market have never tested the products and have zero proof that they have.
 
bernard said:
@Ryuzaki Would you agree that overall authority still trumps EEAT?

I think those at most risk for this kind of punishment are sites that are relatively weaker in links and age.
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No. Everywhere I look, very weak (DR 3 types) local businesses (not local to me, including on other continents) are ranking for every informational query even over the big magazines sites, because they have EEAT signals that Google is eating up. I won't see the usual big magazine until the 10th+ organic slot these days. My advice is to consider what a local business websites has going on (on-site and off-site) that ours don't and to apply that to your site to at least close the gap somewhat.
 
Ryuzaki said:
No. Everywhere I look, very weak (DR 3 types) local businesses (not local to me, including on other continents) are ranking for every informational query even over the big magazines sites, because they have EEAT signals that Google is eating up. I won't see the usual big magazine until the 10th+ organic slot these days. My advice is to consider what a local business websites has going on (on-site and off-site) that ours don't and to apply that to your site to at least close the gap somewhat.
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Ok, I was thinking roundup reviews here.

As for individual product reviews, I see EEAT sites ranking well, but roundup reviews still seem dominated by the big brands who just write a paragraph about each product.
 
bernard said:
As for individual product reviews, I see EEAT sites ranking well, but roundup reviews still seem dominated by the big brands who just write a paragraph about each product.
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True, sorry. I'm in tunnel-vision mode regarding my own info-based stuff. I feel like I have been seeing what you're describing. Round-ups do seem to be getting a bit of a pass compared to single product reviews. I'm sure they're going to come under fire as Google figures out how they'd prefer to handle that. I wouldn't pivot to it if I was reading this, thinking it's a window of opportunity.

An easy thing for Google to say would be "Does each product listed in your round-up have links out to individual product review pages that abide by our suggestions and guidelines for product reviews?" Basically forcing round-ups to be made up of products that have been individually reviewed in a sufficient, hands-on manner.
 
The good question is if EEAT is cumulative sitewide or based on each post. If I had to guess on limited experience, I would think it was sitewide/author based.

Maybe it is wishful thinking, because that would make it easier to do just some EEAT reviews.

Again from personal experience, I've found just a couple of unique images and just a couple of in-depth individual real reviews seem to make a difference in your roundup review quality.

As if you don't have to go into details with all products (why would you), but you can do like 3-5 products based on objective specs or second hand recommendations, then test those and give your input, aka "Product A and Product B both come recommended in tests and on Reddit, so we decided to get our hands on both and do our own test, here are the results"
 
bernard said:
Ok, I was thinking roundup reviews here.

As for individual product reviews, I see EEAT sites ranking well, but roundup reviews still seem dominated by the big brands who just write a paragraph about each product.
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If you look at the most competitive niches, Forbes and similar sites are still ranking the best and it's not even close.

They tick all the boxes in terms of what Feb 23 Reviews update wants you to produce. Plus, they have massive authority. Plus, their authors are EEAT enough by themselves to not cause any issues.

So, obviously they rank first.

In my opinion, it's fairly obvious that EEAT can apply at the site level. There are sites where all financial content is written by new graduates who studies English literature. But the site itself is considered an authority in the financial space, so who cares.

In terms of reviews, if you read what Google published about how to write reviews you can pretty easily identify how they are going to be automating this in their system.

"Evaluate the product from a user's perspective" = Does the page use terms like "I", "we"? Then, does the page have content similar to "for user X this is good because Y"? Does the content contain FAQ's to answer questions a user might have when reviewing these products? Does the informational payload suggest that the review actually tested the product themselves?

"Demonstrate that you are knowledgeable about the products reviewed – show you are an expert." = Does the page include all the entities / LSI keywords that you'd expect for this topic? Is the page relevant to other pages on the website? Is the author known to publish this type of content? Is the page informationally dense or generic / sales fluff? Is anchor text relevant to page content? Does the site and page have links from sites that are authorities in this niche?

"Provide evidence such as visuals, audio, or other links of your own experience with the product, to support your expertise and reinforce the authenticity of your review" = Does this page have unique images which are not already in our index? Do these images seem to be related to the review?

"Share quantitative measurements about how a product measures up in various categories of performance" = Does the page have quantitative data for each of the products? Does this data use a standardize format throughout the page such that comparison is easy for users (and, more importantly, for the crawler to consume)?

"Explain what sets a product apart from its competitors" = Does the content describe WHY one product is better than another? Not stats. Specifically, what is it about the product that makes it unique?

"Cover comparable products to consider, or explain which products might be best for certain uses or circumstances" = Does the content contain words / phrases that indicate comparison for different types of users? Does this content include the relevant entities too?

"Discuss the benefits and drawbacks of a particular product, based on your own original research" = Does the page have clear positive content and clear negative content for each product? Is this content seemingly based on personal experience rather than purely on facts and product specs? Easy for Google to consume sentiment.

"Describe how a product has evolved from previous models or releases to provide improvements, address issues, or otherwise help users in making a purchase decision" = Does the content include very specific entities such as model numbers / previous names? Does the content explain why the current version is superior than the old?

"Identify key decision-making factors for the product's category and how the product performs in those areas" = LSI / Entities related to a type. Example Google gives for cars is fuel economy, safety, handling etc. Need to make sure your review criteria are specific to the product type. I would format these entities as lists and tables for comparison.

"Describe key choices in how a product has been designed and their effect on the users beyond what the manufacturer says" = Does the content, when condensed to its simplest form, include additional detail beyond what's available on other pages? i.e. is the informational payload unique. (think, ChatGPT, "summarize this review". Do you get a meaningfully unique output compared to other pages?)

"Include links to other useful resources (your own or from other sites) to help a reader make a decision" = Goog will reference linkgraph to check that page is linking to the correct expected pages here. Number of links. Anchor text used outbound and relevancy of anchor + surrounding content to content on the linked page.

"Consider including links to multiple sellers to give the reader the option to purchase from their merchant of choice" = Is page only producing this content to generate affiliate revenue? Is there international options? Generally don't think this is a big component of the algo from what I've seen, but it's super easy to signup to many affiliates... so do it.

"When recommending a product as the best overall or the best for a certain purpose, include why you consider that product the best, with first-hand supporting evidence." = Does the informational payload give many reasons why a product is good? Does the payload explain why it's better than the competition? Does the payload explain why those factors matter to the user? Does the payload contain phrases that suggest that the writer used the product i.e. "when we opened the packaging", "we found ourselves waiting for 3-hours for support because the blades were dull when we first used it to try to cut an apple" versus "the blades can sometimes be dull, which could make cutting more challenging".


"Ensure there is enough useful content in your ranked lists for them to stand on their own, even if you choose to write separate in-depth single product reviews for each recommended product" = Is each product / header section, detailed enough for a user to know whether the product is right for them without having to read anything else on the web? i.e. does it tick literally everything above. Make sure when you structure your content that you keep everything for one product together in a section. Don't do fuel economy for all cars, then safety for all cars etc. I think it's easier for the crawler to understand ordering by product, not criteria (complete guess).

Ultimately, all those points can be condensed into a few simple things.

1. Use the product yourself, and write about your personal experience of each product and their pro's and con's.
2. Create content outside of long-form text i.e. video, photo, tables, data, graphics
3. Link to the right resources and shopping options to help the customer
4. Make the core of the content strong, relevant informational payload dense with entities (this will happen if you're an expert who knows how to judge the product with the right criteria and terminology)
 
I just recently started indexing author pages and adding in more information into the actual author page to beef up the EEAT, even though if you Google the author name - they have a ton of credentials.

@Ryuzaki Would you link to the author page from the author box from each post? I was hesitant to do that because that would basically mean every post would now have another external link to the same page with the author's details. On the other hand, it would point the reader + Google to the author page which shows their credentials.
 
wikibum said:
@Ryuzaki Would you link to the author page from the author box from each post?
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Absolutely. I would think of EEAT on a per-page basis. You need to satisfy it on every page, not just every site. And that can be as simple as linking to the right places.

But what I would have is my own on-site page for each author, and then link out from there to their other stuff (author pages elsewhere, social medias, LinkedIn, etc.) This likely helps associate that author more closely with your site as opposed to it seeming more like a guest author. It is this author page I would link to from the author box.
 
Ryuzaki said:
But what I would have is my own on-site page for each author, and then link out from there to their other stuff (author pages elsewhere, social medias, LinkedIn, etc.) This likely helps associate that author more closely with your site as opposed to it seeming more like a guest author.
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Got it. I beefed up the page with a lot of content, linked to their social media channels, etc.. so hopefully that will help. Thank you!!
 
In a similar boat OP. Going to try re-orienting some of my product content, replace "best" with "what is", add more cons, probably remove affiliate links (surely that must be a signal). Also plan to publish more TOFU/info to create a move obvious "I'm not a pure affiliate play" ratio.

Unfortunately this PRU was spot on, I don't have the products to review (can't afford them nor do I have the space to store them, think high $$ machinery). I realize this might just mean I'm toast but nobody that supplanted me has unique images/hands-on reviews either so.. who the fuck knows..
 
harrytwatter said:
unique images
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If this is all that matters, then go get the images. Find someone who owns the equipment and pay them to give you some unique pictures.

If you can't review the products yourself, find someone who can. Look at how newspapers do it, they call some expert and ask them to give a quote. You can do the same. Use their authority. Do polls among people who use the product.

Gather data and run analysis on it.

I'm not actually sure that the above works, but using your common sense, it should be better than the opposite.
 
harrytwatter said:
In a similar boat OP. Going to try re-orienting some of my product content, replace "best" with "what is", add more cons, probably remove affiliate links (surely that must be a signal). Also plan to publish more TOFU/info to create a move obvious "I'm not a pure affiliate play" ratio.

Unfortunately this PRU was spot on, I don't have the products to review (can't afford them nor do I have the space to store them, think high $$ machinery). I realize this might just mean I'm toast but nobody that supplanted me has unique images/hands-on reviews either so.. who the fuck knows..
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One trick I've seen lots of people use is to edit the photo, add text over it, logo, etc. Take the stock photo and edit it, put your brand name, URL, or something.

Edit the EXIF and change the default author to your name and so on. Put them directly, and be sure not to remove them when optimizing the images.

By doing that, your image will be as unique as possible in this case.
 
Was actually just playing around with some AI image generators that you feed an image and text prompt. Output was decent but whole process was quite time consuming.
 
@Ryuzaki Random question for you about outgoing internal links from a page.
Right now, all my pages link out to the main category pages via a text link with the name of each category. For example: an article about /basketball-players/ is linking out to /basketball/ category and /basketball/players/ sub category via text on the post like Basketball, Basketball Players.

I am thinking, since I am not trying to rank the category pages, that those links are diluting the link juice, so they are better removed than be on there. But then, I keep thinking that I am helping all the other posts listed on that category page get a push as well. So I can't decide if I should remove or not.

Also, I realized - I don't use breadcrumbs but my use of category links is similar in a way. What would you do in my situation?

Option #1 - Remove category page links. Don't add breadcrumbs.
Option #2 - Remove category page links. Add breadcrumbs.
Option #3 - Keep category page links. Add breadcrumbs.
 
@wikibum, what you're doing is pretty much breadcrumbs, with the core difference (if this is the case) that you're building them as contextual links, in which case they'd get a bit more weight. Either way, I'd probably remove them all and set up breadcrumbs so it's automated (option 2).

I don't think it's a waste of page rank. You're losing a little bit to those pages but then it's flowing "semi" equally through the rest. It helps spread the love around for sure. You'd get this with breadcrumbs too, though probably less juice sent into those pages since it'll be templated and outside of the main content.

I don't think it's mission critical, but I would go with option 2 simply so it's set-and-forget. It's the best practice and keeps you from forgetting or making an accident at any point.
 
Ryuzaki said:
I don't think it's mission critical, but I would go with option 2 simply so it's set-and-forget. It's the best practice and keeps you from forgetting or making an accident at any point.
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Got it! Thank you. The category links are pretty much breadcrumbs but without the icons. It is automated as well. I had set it up because I thought it would be easier than breadcrumbs since some posts belong to multiple top level categories, and I wasn't sure how breadcrumbs will handle that.
 
@wikibum, typically you'll need to choose a "primary category" when there's more than one, and it'll only display that chosen category. I also like to change the final part of the breadcrumb to say "Here" instead of the entire title tag. So like: Home > Category > Sub-Category > Here

It sounds to me like you might be using those old school category "tags" at the bottom of posts? I don't think it would hurt to include both breadcrumbs and something like that. I just would escape the obligation to create them manually.

Also, make sure you're using breadcrumb markup if you do use them. Looks great in the SERPs. Yoast makes this pretty easy but you do need to integrate some PHP into your templates (assuming we're talking Wordpress).
 
Ryuzaki said:
typically you'll need to choose a "primary category" when there's more than one, and it'll only display that chosen category. I also like to change the final part of the breadcrumb to say "Here" instead of the entire title tag. So like: Home > Category > Sub-Category > Here
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Makes sense. Thank you.

Ryuzaki said:
It sounds to me like you might be using those old school category "tags" at the bottom of posts? I don't think it would hurt to include both breadcrumbs and something like that. I just would escape the obligation to create them manually.
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You can call them category tags. The tag is the category/archive title.

Ryuzaki said:
Also, make sure you're using breadcrumb markup if you do use them. Looks great in the SERPs. Yoast makes this pretty easy but you do need to integrate some PHP into your templates (assuming we're talking Wordpress).
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100%. I also read that the breadcrumb markup needs to match the on page breadcrumb structure, so will have to work on getting the "Here" in the schema markup.
 
@Ryuzaki I got an internal linking question that I can't seem to find a consistent answer around. I read the threads again but I can't find an answer to this. If I missed it somewhere - feel free to point me in the right direction.

Let's say you have a sports website trying to rank for NFL players and NBA players related keywords. I am trying to find relevant keywords in existing posts to create interlinks. Anyway, my question is:

Let's say you have an article about NFLs best player of the year & NBAs best player of the year.

If I check all posts under the NBA category and find keywords like best player of the year or player of the year. Does it make sense to create a link from those keywords to the NBAs best player of the year post? Even though the keyword doesn't contain the word NBA and knowing there is another post that is around NFLs best player of the year?

I am asking because I would probably have to do the same for the NFL category and I am not sure if Google is smart enough to know the difference lol (since the keywords I am linking to might lack the category keyword in them).

I am thinking, its best if the keyword I am linking from, has the category keyword in it. Like NBA best player of the year (and not just best player of the year). I would appreciate a second opinion.
 
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