It is not looking good with this Google update, says Lily Ray.
I just dug into several examples where The Wirecutter, arguably the best product review site (section) on the internet, has lost positions in the last 2 weeks.
The drops mostly stem from high-volume commercial keywords (50k+ MSV).
But they also include many “best” keywords as well (e.g. “best bluetooth speaker“)
You might think “oh, maybe they were outranked by another product review article?”
Nope.
In every case I have found, they were outranked by an ecommerce site.
Usually Amazon.
And these are product/category pages on the ecommerce sites, not informational.
Below I have shown 4 examples visually using Sistrix data.
Red = affiliate/product review site Green = ecomm site
Look how affiliate sites are dropping, either by several positions on the first 2 pages, or out of the top 20 entirely.
Look at the distribution of green vs. red.
*The update is still rolling out so this could change.
But it is consistent with what Google has been doing with MANY updates over the years.
And this is why doing SEO for product review sites is NOT THE SAME as doing SEO for any other type of website.
They have their own unique challenges.