Businesses can improve the credibility of their products or services by encouraging their customers to write positive things about their products or services on Google reviews. Many people make buying decisions based on Google reviews of Companies. Therefore, it can be seen as a powerful tool for branding and business marketing.
Given the importance of Google reviews, many online marketers try to manipulate the platform with spam and fake reviews. Google on the other hand has been taking many initiatives to bring about trust and transparency and their review system. It aims to stop the manipulation of their review system. They have come up with a new update for improving the reliability of the content that is generated by users.
It also comes with a new user interface and a robust filter to weed out fake reviews from genuine ones. It also comes with a response system that can help businesses with improving their user experience. They can now respond to the user-feedbacks and provide updates.
How will Google Review System Update impact your SEO?
Google has always emphasized the Double E-EA-T model for content quality, which is an improved version of E-A-T. The second ‘E’ added to the concept is for ‘Experience’.
E-A-T grading concept
- Expertise – Written by an expert with sound knowledge of the topic.
- Authoritativeness – Content that is backed by trusted sources, thereby signifying the authority.
- Trustworthiness – Content that is unbiased and genuine, written with no other intention.
These grading parameters help people to gauge the credibility of reviews and go a long way in minimizing manipulations with fake reviews and spam content.
Now with the ‘Experience’ being added to EAT, the system can be more transparent. It adds another security layer to improve the quality of user content. Here the reviewers will need to upload proof of the positive or negative reviews that they write. If it is implemented the right way, Google reviews can be used by businesses to improve the search rankings of landing pages.
The display layout has been improved quite significantly with the April update. However, it is accompanied by strict guidelines to filter out the reviews that are posted with unsolicited intent.
All these new features help in improving the trust factor of people who rely on Google reviews to make informed choices. It is also quite obvious that the new update is going to create an impact on the SEO strategies that businesses do to popularize their brands. SEO companies or internet marketers will need to make their strategic changes according to the new guidelines.
As the main goal of the update is to improve the quality of content and to filter the fake reviews, the extent of impact might not be as much for SEO. It might also depend on the kind of business or industry sector.
However, these reviews can help businesses benefit greatly by drawing in the incoming traffic. As they are now considered genuine and unbiased, they have the potential of attracting targeted traffic. Companies can expect to see a good improvement in sales conversions by attracting qualified traffic to their pages.
From all this information, we can infer that companies will surely benefit if the reviews are genuine. On the other hand, fake reviews will do more damage than good, which could be the drop in search engine rankings of the pages that are linked. Your SEO efforts to improve the rankings will simply fail if you resort to using fake reviews for achieving short-term gains.
Does the Update also impact Guest Posting?
Guest posting is one of the online marketing strategies that has been effectively used by big and small businesses to attract quality traffic to their sales pages. It has proved to be an effective method to build a strong perception of brands with the target audiences. Although it is a great way to post backlinks on high authority blogs, it is also seen as the best way to provide useful information to the readers, which is the main reason why Google approves it.
If guest posting is done in a spammy or manipulative manner, such as publishing low-quality content on unrelated or low-authority websites purely for the sake of gaining backlinks, it could hypothetically be regarded as a breach of Google’s guiding principles. Such websites could see a drop in ranking and traffic.
Google search has evolved a lot with new algorithm updates being rolled out in a periodic manner. They strive to provide high quality search results with links and descriptions of highly relevant sites. Therefore, they discourage any activity that aims to artificially manipulate search rankings, including guest posting schemes that lack value and authenticity.
To ensure that your guest posting efforts align with Google’s guidelines, it’s important to focus on creating high-quality, original content that provides value to the readers. Additionally, you should aim to build genuine relationships with reputable websites in your industry rather than engage in mass guest posting for the sole purpose of acquiring backlinks.
Nevertheless, the recent Google review update on April 2023 is focused on improving the accuracy of search results but does not directly impact guest posting. Google’s algorithm for guest posting remains unchanged. Google uses different parameters for evaluating the quality and relevancy of guest posts. Some general best practices for guest posting to enhance their SEO and ranking:
For Writers:
- Research the target blog’s audience and tailor your writing to their interests and needs.
- Include relevant, high-quality links within your guest post that add value for readers and complement the overall message of the post.
- Focus on creating engaging, well-written content that users will want to read and share.
- Use keyword research to help guide your writing and optimize your post for search engines.
Never engage in black hat SEO techniques that manipulate search engine rankings. Make sure that your content stands out from the crowd and delivers value to both readers and search engines alike.
For Publishers:
- Don’t accept guest posts with low-quality or spammy content that could harm your website’s reputation.
- Check for duplicate content to ensure that the same content isn’t being published on multiple websites, which could lead to penalties from search engines.
- Be selective about the external links included in guest posts, as using too many or irrelevant links could negatively impact your SEO.
- Ensure that the guest post follows your website’s editorial guidelines and standards.
As we can see, quality and relevancy are the keys to guest posting success. If you try unethical shortcuts or black-hat techniques, Google is going to detect it quickly and penalize those pages. If you value the reputation of your brand name, just stay away from all such practices and strictly follow Google guidelines.
Conclusion
Google Reviews is seen as a credible platform by users to know about the feedback and comments written about various companies. Now with this algorithm update, users can expect to see more genuine reviews as the fake ones will get filtered out. The new display is also attractive.
Companies can encourage engagement by using the response feature on the reviews. It also allows businesses to address the issues and provide clarifications on bad reviews written about them. Such engagement measures can help in building long-term relationships with prospective and existing customers.