PageRank for eCommerce websites is important if you want to increase your sales. You need to have a proper SEO strategy to keep improving your PageRank score. This means having to do the ballet dance with Google all the time. However, Mr. Google can be a terrible dancer, since he is known to change the rhythm unexpectedly from time to time. It is well known that updated to the algorithm can happen daily, and these usually go unnoticed.
However, they also release major updates, which are the ones everybody analyzes and adapts. By 2021, many of these have been released. Since the main objective of most websites is to aid businesses to make money online, it is really important to know what is happening with the search engine.
Let’s see what has been going on with the main updates Google has rolled out during 2021.
2021 Google Updates in PageRank for eCommerce websites.
2021 many different releases have happened. Some have been confirmed by Alphabet, while others have been discovered by webmasters and SEO specialists. Let’s see some of them in detail.
-
Passage Indexing
This update looks for passages or phrases that might be helpful to a given specific niche. This makes the crawler look for keywords over the whole article instead of only titles and similar tags. This differs from snippets in the fact that it can pick passages or phrases from any part of the article that previously could have been ignored.
-
Feature snippet drop and recovery
MozCast brought to the attention of the industry that many different featured snippets disappeared from a lot of search results pages, which caused a decline of over 40%, considered the biggest one in more than 5 years. Some niches were more affected than others, with the medical and financial sectors being one of the most affected. Many medical and legal keywords were affected by this issue.
This seems to have happened with the release of the YMYL broad algorithm and currently, there’s not a workaround for this. So, it’s important that if you are using PageRank for eCommerce websites in these niches to be careful to avoid being impacted by this update.
-
Updates on products review
Nothing is more critical to eCommerce sites than products review. Social proof can make or break a company. In April, there was an update, called the product review update. After this review, products reviews must be of good quality. Google is being smart in distinguishing between reviews and pushy attempts to sell products via reviews. Reviews with keyword stuffing and pointing to Amazon links were penalized. So, it’s important to have quality reviews to make the most out of them for ranking.
-
November Core Update
November brought another important update to the algorithm. Since it has been so recent, there’s little information on all the implications it has. However, webmasters of eCommerce websites need to be on the lookout for this one. Mobile searches are being impacted, along with searches in health and real estate.
Also, this update came just before Black Friday and Christmas, which can cause issues to businesses that had their product copies adapted to the algorithm. So it is important to keep an eye on how this new update is performing.
