Algorithm Updates
April 2021 product reviews update: dates, what changed and what to do
Google's first product reviews update launched on 8 April 2021 for English reviews and finished on 22 April. What it rewarded and what to do now.
Ecommerce SEO - product pages, feeds and faceted navigation
What Ecommerce SEO means
Ecommerce SEO covers how online stores get product and category pages found. It spans product structured data and Merchant Center feeds that power free and paid shopping listings, faceted navigation that can multiply crawlable URLs, and the category architecture that decides which pages collect links and rank.
Algorithm Updates
April 2023 reviews update: dates, what changed and what to do
Google's April 2023 reviews update ran 13 days from 12 to 25 April 2023 and widened the reviews system beyond products to services and things.
Algorithm Updates
December 2021 product reviews update: dates and what to do
Google's December 2021 product reviews update ran 20 days, 1 to 21 December 2021, and added two new best practices for review content.
Algorithm Updates
February 2023 product reviews update: dates and what to do
Google's February 2023 product reviews update ran 14 days from 21 February to 7 March 2023 in 11 languages. Dates, scope and review guidance.
Algorithm Updates
July 2022 product reviews update: dates and what to do
Google's July 2022 product reviews update ran 6 days, 27 July to 2 August 2022, for English-language product reviews. What Google confirmed.
Algorithm Updates
March 2022 product reviews update: dates and what to do
Google's March 2022 product reviews update ran 14 days, 23 March to 6 April 2022, and clarified how ranked lists and best-of reviews are judged.
Algorithm Updates
Merchant reviews update (2010): demoting bad merchants
On 1 December 2010 Google added an algorithm to demote merchants giving an extremely poor user experience, after a New York Times story. What changed.
Algorithm Updates
November 2023 reviews update: dates, what changed and what to do
Google's November 2023 reviews update ran 29 days from 8 November to 7 December 2023, the last reviews update Google announced on its dashboard.
Algorithm Updates
September 2022 product reviews update: dates and what to do
Google's September 2022 product reviews update ran six days, 20 to 26 September 2022, on English-language reviews, overlapping a core update.
News
Google auto-enables native checkout for Merchant Center stores
Merchants are getting emails saying products are eligible for checkout inside AI Mode and Gemini, with opt-out handled on the platform side.
Reports
AI shoppers now convert 54% better than non-AI traffic, Adobe finds
Adobe's May 2026 data shows AI-referred retail visits converting 54% better than non-AI traffic, a reversal from a year earlier.
Studies
Product schema on a B2B store: +111% clicks, per Simplified Search
Simplified Search reports Product markup on one unnamed B2B ecommerce site lifted impressions 119% and clicks 111%, with no control group.
Tools
Product schema checker for product snippets
Product schema checker: test Product JSON-LD against Google product snippet rules for name, offers, price, currency and stock. Free, runs in your browser.
News
Merchant Center documents Store ratings' review and star bar
Google added a requirements section to Merchant Center's Store ratings doc: a 100-review minimum, a 3.5-star floor, a 24-month window, per-country scoring.
Reports
Shopping Graph grew from 45 to 60 billion listings in 19 months
Google's own disclosures put the Shopping Graph at 45 billion listings in October 2024, 50 billion in January 2026, and past 60 billion by May 2026.
Studies
Silly Santa's 7-country hreflang rollout: a Skalum case study
Skalum's case study on Shopify brand Silly Santa: hreflang across 7 ccTLDs, with UK organic users up 297.5% and Norway's local traffic share up to 93%.
Studies
REI cut 34 million crawlable URLs to 300,000 by taming facets
REI's technical SEO team told Botify's Crawl2Convert summit how it cut crawlable URLs from 34 million to 300,000 by reining in faceted navigation.
Studies
Merchant Center feed fixes and three click gains, per Uproer
Uproer's published case study reports feed-level Google Merchant Center changes lifted clicks 130%, 116% and 3,500 for three unnamed ecommerce brands.
Studies
Simms Fishing's Magento to Shopify migration: the real numbers
Inflow's case study: Simms Fishing saw organic traffic up 126% YoY and non-brand category traffic up 5,642% after a Magento to Shopify move.
Tools
Faceted navigation URL parameter checker
Faceted navigation URL checker: test a filtered URL's parameters against Google's crawling guidance and get a robots.txt block. Free, runs in your browser.
News
ChatGPT Ads adds oCPC bidding and a product carousel
OpenAI added beta conversion bidding, dynamic URL macros and a multi-product carousel to ChatGPT Ads product feed campaigns on August 7, 2026.
Studies
Deloitte: 0.1s faster mobile speed lifted retail conversion 8.4%
Deloitte's 2019 study of 37 brand sites found a 0.1s mobile speed gain lifted retail conversion 8.4%. Shopify data adds a 100ms benchmark.
News
Merchant Center adds AI Performance Insights for share of voice
A new Merchant Center report benchmarks brand visibility on AI Mode, AI Overviews and Gemini, plus shopping funnel and attribute-gap data.
News
Google's 2026 Merchant Center product spec, three effective dates
New shipping and video attributes, a higher minimum image resolution and a longer rollout: what changes on 14 April 2026, 30 June 2026 and 31 January 2027.