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Google Merchant Center Policy Says AI Generated Reviews Are Spam

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Robot Reviewing Food Google Logo

Google has posted a new policy saying AI-generated reviews are against its policies, disallowed and considered spam. If you find such content, Google said you must mark it as spam in your feed with the is_spam attribute.

Google posted the update over here, it reads, “Automated Content: We don’t allow reviews that are primarily generated by an automated program or artificial intelligence application. If you have identified such content, it should be marked as spam in your feed using the is_spam attribute.”

How does one identify if user-generated reviews are generated by AI is another story. But if you are posting your own reviews using AI, you must mark them as spam if you are using Google Merchant Center.

Now, Google Search has been very lax about content generated with AI in general. Google is okay with content being generated by AI as long as it is useful and helpful. This policy somewhat goes against that, although, these are reviews and I guess Google expects humans to leave reviews, not robots.

Google also clarified its other policies, here are those clarifications:

  • Spam: We don’t allow spam content. Ensure any content known to contain irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text is marked as spam in your feed using the is_spam attribute.
  • Dangerous products or acts: Don’t submit reviews of regulated products that can cause damage, harm, or injury. For example, don’t submit reviews of guns, tobacco products, or regulated drugs. Additionally, don’t include content that depicts or provides instructions to complete activities that are dangerous and/or widely illegal.
  • Phone numbers, email addresses or URLs: Don’t submit phone numbers, email addresses and links to other websites in the review content.
  • Personal and confidential information: Don’t submit reviews that contain personal information, including but not limited to full names, credit card information, national insurance number, driving license information, etc.
  • Keep it clean: Don’t submit reviews that use obscene, profane, or offensive language or include content that depicts scenes of violence, serious injury or death, contains personal attacks, or are defamatory.
  • Conflict of interest: Don’t submit reviews that were paid for or are otherwise inauthentic. Reviews are most valuable when they are honest and unbiased. We remove reviews that we believe have conflicts of interest and/or have been written by employees or people with a vested interest in the product. Only submit reviews that were honestly solicited from customers who made a purchase.
  • Illegal content: Don’t submit reviews that contain or link to unlawful content, such as links that facilitate the sale of prescription drugs without a prescription, illegal drugs, counterfeit products, or illicit weapons. This content is not allowed.
  • Malware & Phishing: Don’t submit reviews containing links to malware, viruses, or other harmful software. We don’t allow phishing or other content that harms or interferes with the operation of the networks, servers, or other infrastructure of Google or others.
  • Copyrighted content: Don’t submit reviews that infringe on others’ rights, including copyright. For more information or to file a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) request, review our copyright procedures.
  • Trademark infringement: Don’t submit content that uses a trademark in a way that’s likely to cause confusion about the origin of the product being reviewed.
  • Plagiarism: Don’t submit reviews containing appropriation of content created by another person or entity.
  • Sexually explicit material: Don’t submit reviews that contain sexually explicit material. We also don’t allow reviews that sexually exploit children or present them in a sexual manner. For this type of content, we remove the review, shut down the product reviews feed, and send a report to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) and to law enforcement. This content is not allowed.
  • Hate speech: Don’t submit reviews that advocate against groups of people based on their race or ethnic origin, nationality, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, sexual orientation, or gender identity. Violent language, terrorist content, or content intended to incite and encourage violent acts or extremist behavior, are not allowed in reviews.
  • Cross promotion of other products/websites: We don’t allow reviews that include promotional content for other unrelated websites, products, or services. If you have identified such content, it should be marked as spam in your feed using the attribute.
  • Off-topic reviews: We may remove reviews that primarily seek to discuss other topics unrelated to the product itself. This includes comments about shipping and delivery, experiences with particular retailers, political or social controversy, attacks on others, or don’t represent a first-hand experience with the product. This also includes merchant responses to reviewer comments.
  • Impersonation: We don’t allow reviews from people claiming to be someone that they aren’t.
  • Language: Reviews should be submitted in the original language they are written in. Google will display reviews in the original language with an option on the Shopping page to be translated to the user’s language.
  • Duplicate content: Each review should only appear in one feed and only once in that feed. If a review applies to multiple variations of a product, this should be designated by including multiple unique product identifiers and URLs with the review. The same review shouldn’t appear in feeds from different retailers. The retailer should own the review and shouldn’t send Google content syndicated from other sources. In the case of duplicate reviews in multiple feeds, we may blocklist one or more of the reviews or entire feeds.

Finally, Google posted guidance on how it can enforce these policies:

  • We use a combination of automated and human evaluation to ensure that content and reviews comply with our policies. Our enforcement technologies use machine-learning algorithms to help protect our merchants and users by keeping our shopping platforms safe. More complex, nuanced, or severe cases are reviewed and evaluated by our specially trained experts who conduct content evaluations that might be difficult for algorithms to perform alone, for example, because an understanding of the context of the piece of content is required.
  • We take action on content and reviews that violate our policies. This may include disapproving violating content or a violating review, as well as issuing warnings or suspending accounts for repeated or egregious violations. We take repeat violations of our policies seriously.
  • When an image is flagged for a policy violation, we will now also block the associated review content.

In short, the “automated content” policy is new, the other policies were just clarified.

Forum discussion at Twitter.



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Google Search Ranking Algorithm Volatility Today

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Google Algorithm Update

I am seeing some signs of some big Google Search ranking volatility and shuffling today. The November core update just finished, so Google would say it is not the core update but the November reviews update is still rolling out. Or maybe this new ranking volatility is unrelated to any confirmed update – I don’t know.

Many of the tracking tools spike this morning, which means they are seeing some big ranking volatility this morning. I am also seeing some increased chatter within the SEO community but it is early, so it is limited.

Let’s start with the tools today.

Google Search Volatility Tracking Tools

Semrush:

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SimilarWeb:

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SERPmetrics:

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Advanced Web Rankings:

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Cognitive SEO (seems stalled):

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Accuranker:

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Mozcast (normally updates later today):

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Algoroo:

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SERPstat:

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Wincher:

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So most of the tools are showing big changes in the Google Search results.

SEO Chatter

Here is the chatter I am seeing within the SEO community from this site and WebmasterWorld:

Very slow today…

Some wild Ride traffic-wise started the last hours.
I am getting bursts of traffic for a short period of time that makes the gained
traffic while the core update is running return again.
Appears like a fight of Google core algorithm and other ongoing algorithms is going on
and from time to time, some algorithm fires and activates and takes over
and returns the traffic, while other times, another algorithm takes control and smashes the traffic back to low and renders the Google core algorithm useless.
It’s heavy volatile.

and just as the update finished, the results are shuffled again. It’s so disgusting at this point.

I feel like the “December” update has already begun…

Our UK traffic and conversions plummeted within hours of the update finishing.

Yeah we took a big downturn last week, but thought it was Google Manipulation for Black Friday.

But since the update finished, it feels like our sites are offline, especially today.

What are you all seeing?

Is this the end of the reviews update or something new?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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Google November 2023 Core Update Fully Rolled Out

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Google Core Update

After just under 26 days, the Google November 2023 core update is finally done rolling out. It took almost two weeks longer to roll out than the average core update and rolled out during the huge shopping days on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, also overlapping the November 2023 reviews update. So it was a big deal.

Google posted the update was done at 11:32 am ET on November 28, 2023, after it started rolling out on November 2, 2023 at 3:09 PM ET.

This is the longest documented core update rollout, the previous longest core update rollout went to the August 2023 core update took 16 days, this one was 10 days longer. It wasn’t as long as most SEOs thought it would take, but it was the longest rollout of a core update. It was not the longest update in general, the December 2022 helpful content update took 38 days to roll out but it was the longest core update roll out in history.

As a reminder, the October 2023 core update started on October 5, 2023 and completed on October 19, 2023, completing two weeks prior to this November core update rolled out.

Google November 2023 Core Update Post

Here are the posts on the release times:

Documented Volatility For November 2023 Core Update

This update kicked off quickly and was super volatile early on. The chatter within the SEO community was pretty heated throughout – even during the Thanksgiving holiday break. The tools themselves seemed to calm down, even with the reviews update rolling out the following week.

There was some additional chatter in the past 24 hours about massive volatility but the tools are not picking that up and the chatter was not that insane.

The tools themselves shows volatility from November 2nd through November 17th or so. More on that later.

Google November 2023 Core Update Quick Facts:

Here are the most important things that we know right now in short form:

  • Name: Google November 2023 Broad Core Update
  • Launched: November 2, 2023 at around 3 pm ET
  • Rollout: Finished on November 28, 2023 at around 11:30 am ET
  • Targets: It looks at all types of content
  • Penalty: It is not a penalty, it promotes or rewards great web pages
  • Global: This is a global update impacting all regions, in all languages.
  • Impact: Google would not tell me what percentage of queries or searches were impacted by this update but so far, this seems to be a typical core update that reaches wide and the impact is fast.
  • Discover: Core updates impact Google Discover and other features, also feature snippets and more.
  • Recover: If you were hit by this, then you will need to look at your content and see if you can do better with Google’s core update advice.
  • Refreshes: Google will do periodic refreshes to this algorithm but may not communicate those updates in the future. Maybe this is what we saw the past couple of weeks or all those unconfirmed Google updates.

Overlapping Updates: November Core & November Reviews Updates

Unlike with the October core update, we had the October 2023 spam update roll out, where Google said if you are not spamming then you weren’t hit by the spam update, you were hit by the core update.

With a reviews update and a core update, that is a bit harder for Google to say. They are similar updates that can impact similar sites. So there was for sure some confusion between the two. It would be hard to know for sure if your site was hit by the November core update versus the November reviews update unless your site got hit in the first batch of the core update volatility before the reviews update touched down.

Google Tracking Tools On November 2023 Core Update:

Here is what the tools showed over the past month or so with this core and reviews update rollout:

Semrush:

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SERPmetrics:

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Advanced Web Rankings:

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Accuranker:

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Mozcast:

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Cognitive SEO (seems stalled):

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Algoroo:

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SimilarWeb:

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SERPstat:

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Wincher:

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Mangools:

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Previous Broad Core Updates

Here is a list of the most recent core updates we’ve seen since Google started to confirm them. Previously we nicknamed them Phantom updates or unconfirmed updates.

How did you all do? Hope it wasn’t too bad?

Forum discussion at X and WebmasterWorld.



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Bing Chat / Microsoft Copilot Balanced Mode Used 70% Of The Time With Creative & Precise Mode At 15% Each

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Bing Robot Doing Math

Mikhail Parakhin from Microsoft shared how often the different modes in Microsoft Copilot, formerly known as Bing Chat, are used. There is Balanced mode, creative mode and precise mode. Balanced mode gets 60-70% of the usages, whereas the other two modes get about 15% each.

Mikhail wrote on X, “Balanced is the most popular, maybe 60-70% of the people (it is the fastest and the default). Creative and Precise are 15%-ish each.”

Bing Chat Copilot Modes

Here are those posts:

Bing Chat Usage Post

I thought creative mode would get more usage than precise mode because of the image generation aspect but I guess I was wrong.

To learn more about these chat modes, read this story.

Forum discussion at X.



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