Product Comparisons & Google Products Reviews Update

Alan Kent from Google was asked if if product comparison posts like comparing one product against another “count as reviews in the eyes of Google and, more importantly, the Product Reviews Updates?” Alan sent not necessarily.

Alan Kent explained on Twitter that “you can certainly do comparison product reviews,” “but just saying “X vs Y” in the title is unlikely to make it considered a legitimate review,” he added.

So it all depends on the amount of content, how the content is structured and if you can really call it a product review or not.

Google has been doing basic product comparisons in search for a long time now and then tried to get more sophisticated with buyer guides in search.

But when it comes to what triggers Google to say the product reviews algorithm should look at this piece of content, Google dug more into that in their blog post over here.

Here are those tweets:

You can certainly do comparison product reviews, but just saying “X vs Y” in the title is unlikely to make it considered a legitimate review. For more info on comparison and “best” rankings see https://t.co/qEo6rWcLqx

— Alan Kent (@akent99) April 12, 2022

Alan Kent added more clarification later:

A review that compares two (or more) products is completely valid and useful to users. I was just saying it holistically needs to look like a review (title and contents), not just claim to be a review in the title and the contents is really a link farm with no real value.

— Alan Kent (@akent99) April 13, 2022

I should note, Google also does a lot of search related product comparison features, like I mentioned above – these may be slight upgrades to those:

Google added more information on free product listing section. pic.twitter.com/5Xn87h5mji

— Punit (@Punit6008) April 7, 2022

Google Shopping added competitive price of products pic.twitter.com/FyRt1jqHk6

— Punit (@Punit6008) April 6, 2022

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Forum discussion at Twitter.