Google’s December 2021 product reviews update was bigger than the April product reviews update, say data providers
On December 1, 2021 Google began to rollout the second product reviews update for the year, the December 2021 product reviews update. This was at the tail-end of the November 2021 core update that finished rolling out the day before, on November 30, 2021 (note, this is an important point for this story). RankRanger and Semrush, two SEO toolsets, sent us data that showed that the December 2021 product reviews update was more volatile than the April 2021 product reviews update – but there may be some caveats to that.
Please note that Google told us that this product reviews update will take approximately three weeks to roll out and we are only now in the start of week number two. So the data may change but generally when Google rolls out these updates, the bulk of the impact you would see from an update would be in the first few days of that rollout.
Data providers show December was bigger than April
RankRanger. The RankRanger team first sent us their data showing that overall the December fluctuations and volatility “were substantially higher in the top three and top five positions,” the company said. This is across comparing the changes in the top three, top five and top ten ranking positions in Google Search:
This is also when looking at average position changes overall between April (in blue) and December (in orange) product reviews updates:
The company also broke down just the December volatility by niche across sectors by top three, top five and top ten results. The company showed the top five positions both retail and travel stand out as having the most fluctuations and in the top ten results, health and finance showed the most fluctuations.
And you can see that the RankRanger index tracker tool is now starting to show this update somewhat slow down a bit:
Top winners and losers were also provided by RankRanger, showing Tripadvisor, Choice Hotels, Agoda and Hotwire were the losers and Expedia, Kayak, USA News were the top gainers.
Semrush. The Semrush team first sent us their data showing that overall the December fluctuations and volatility also peaked at much higher rates than the April product reviews update. The company said that the volatility highs seen during the December update are far greater than what was recorded in April update.
But Semrush said that if you look at the overall volatility it would appear that the April update was 44% more volatility than the December update. That is likely because this year overall was a lot more volatile than previous years, sending the numbers a bit off overall. If you look at level of volatility as compared to what Semrush normally would see, the April Product Review Update was significantly more volatile. Here is that chart showing this data: