SEARCHENGINES
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
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Source: www.seroundtable.com
SEARCHENGINES
Microsoft Bing Says The lastmod Tag In XML Sitemap File Is Critical

Microsoft Bing posted a new blog post saying “for XML sitemaps, one of the most critical tags you can include in your sitemap is the “lastmod” tag.” And it will become even more critical as Bing is reworking its crawl scheduling stack to rely more on this lastmod field.
Yes, by June, the way Bing decides what to crawl will be more dependent on the lastmod tag. Fabrice Canel from Microsoft wrote, “we are revamping our crawl scheduling stack to better utilize the information provided by the “lastmod” tag in sitemaps.” This is being done so it can “enhance” the “crawl efficiency by reducing unnecessary crawling of unchanged content and prioritizing recently updated content.”
“We have already begun implementing these changes on a limited scale and plan to fully roll them out by June,” he added.
So making sure your lastmod date is accurate is now even more important. It should be the last time you modified the URL, not the time the URL was first published and not the time the XML sitemap file was generated. In fact, that is the biggest issue Bing found with the field, that it often just shows the date the XML sitemap file was generated and not the date the page of the URL was last modified.
Here are some data points Bing put together on XML sitemaps:
- 58% of hosts have at least one XML sitemap.
- 84% of these sitemaps have a lastmod attribute set.
- 79% have lastmod values correct.
- 18% have lastmod values not correctly set.
- 3% has lastmod values for only some of the URLs.
- 16% of these sitemaps don’t have a lastmod attribute set.
- 42% of hosts don’t have one XML sitemap
Oh, Bing still wants you to use the IndexNow protocol for the most efficient crawl solution but if you don’t – make sure your lastmod date is accurate.
In terms of Google, in 2015 Google said they don’t really use the lastmod date but then changed that in 2020 they said they do. The current Google documentation says, “Google uses the lastmod value if it’s consistently and verifiably (for example by comparing to the last modification of the page) accurate.”
Forum discussion at Twitter.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Search Console Video Indexing Report Adds Impressions & Sitemap Filters

Google has updated the video indexing report within Google Search Console to add impression data and a way to filter the report by your available sitemaps.
As a reminder, the video indexing report went fully live in August 2022 after Google started to slowly roll out the video index report within Google Search Console earlier in 2022.
Google added two new features to the report; impression data and a sitemap filter. Here is a GIF of these two features:
You can now overlay the impressions your indexed videos saw directly in this report. Google said, “the impressions are aggregated by page which means that if the same page appears multiple times in a single search result page (or a single Discover session), then we consider each appearance as an impression.”
Here is what it looks like:
Google added, “The Search performance report groups video search appearances by property, not by URL, which means that if multiple pages show in a search results, we’ll count only one impression. As a result, the Search performance report can show lower impression counts than the Video page indexing report.”
The sitemap filter is a nice addition also, so you can see what videos you submitted via your sitemaps compared to what Google really indexed. Google said, “To help you focus on the video pages that matter most to you, you can now filter the Video indexing report to show only video pages that are present in a selected sitemap. The filter applies to all the report features: the chart, chart totals, issue list, and exports.”
Here is a screenshot of that:
You also see a section in the sitemaps location for discovered videos:
Hi @JohnMu @rustybrick
“Discovered Video” Tab in Google search console is it something new? pic.twitter.com/hu0rcEGqKW— Jaydip Pancholi (@jaydip_ahir_333) February 2, 2023
Google Search Console Video indexing report has been also added to the Indexing>Sitemaps section.
now we can easily navigate & monitor page indexing & video indexing from the sitemap.
CC:- @glenngabe @rustybrick #SEO #GoogleSearch pic.twitter.com/NT18IE8O2f
— Vijay Chauhan 📈 (@VijayChauhanSEO) February 2, 2023
Again, if Google sees videos on your site, Google will display the new “Video indexing report” on the left navigation bar in the coverage section of Google Search Console. The report shows the status of video indexing on your site. It helps you answer the following questions:
- In how many pages has Google identified a video?
- Which videos were indexed successfully?
- What are the issues preventing videos from being indexed?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
SEARCHENGINES
Helpful Content & Link Spam Update Done, SEO, Search Console & More
-
AMAZON7 days ago
41 Super Practical Valentine’s Day Gifts Of 2023
-
MARKETING5 days ago
11 Email Marketing Design Tips to Drive More Revenue
-
MARKETING7 days ago
Is a Marketing Degree Worth it in 2023?
-
MARKETING6 days ago
MarTech’s marketing operations experts to follow
-
SOCIAL7 days ago
Google Outlines Ongoing Efforts to Combat China-Based Influence Operations Targeting Social Apps
-
WORDPRESS5 days ago
Your Quick Guide in 2023
-
NEWS1 day ago
OpenAI Introduces ChatGPT Plus with Monthly Subscription of $20
-
WORDPRESS7 days ago
The Top 6 WordPress SEO Plugins