Structured Data: Tell Google About Product Pros and Cons in Markup

[engine]

Google has said that structured data can now include product Pros and Cons in the markup.

You can tell Google about your pros and cons by supplying pros and cons structured data on editorial review pages. When you're adding structured data to your web pages, you can use Rich Results Test to make sure it's correct and valid for Google Search. The tool has been recently extended to check for pros and cons structured data in addition to all the other structured data types supported by Google Search.

It goes on to say that if it's not provided, Google will try to automatically identify Pros and Cons from the web.

This appears to be yet another step google is taking to become more of an ecommerce destination business, imho.

[developers.google.com...]

[Robert Charlton]

Fascinating way for Google both to cross reference and to 'truth check' many levels of user data.

As the article notes, product review articles are increasingly popular. I've noticed that major niche and general news publishers, particularly those with paywalls, are creating or buying review sites and services, often using them as freebies to attract email readers and visitors. In my experience, the NYT purchase of Wirecutter is perhaps the most notable recent such purchase.

It strikes me that Google was one of the pioneers in this kind of reportage, when it purchased Zagat Reviews as one of its early acquisitions, at the least to kick-start its own Local user reviews in various manifestations over the years.

I'm also reminded that one of the early example Panda quality-signals that was suggested was that Google would look upon the presence of product comparisons of diverse products favorably. Comparison and review articles of course are also open to misuse, and I'm thinking that this structured data, combined with other data might perhaps be a means of cross-checking these reviews.

This is speculation... I don't know if there's a "sufficient-consensus" patent, particularly when AI is involved... but Google certainly has ways of assessing algos developed from seed sets, and I can see this data as one step further in gathering and winnowing this input.

While Pros and Cons on ecommerce product pages themselves are currently not being considered, I can see this as a step towards evaluating them.

[Robert Charlton]

To comment on my own post, above, some emphasis now added...

This is speculation... I don't know if there's a "sufficient-consensus" patent, particularly when AI is involved... but Google certainly has ways of assessing algos developed from seed sets, and I can see this data as one step further in gathering and winnowing this input.

Regarding the idea of consense, see this Google blog, which (blush] I had not seen at the time... ....

New ways we're helping you find high-quality information
by Pandu Nayak - Google Fellow and Vice President, Search
Aug 11, 2022
[blog.google...]

This sentence jumped out at me (my emphasis added)... but the whole article, and several others, are relevant...

By using our latest AI model, Multitask Unified Model (MUM), our systems can now understand the notion of consensus, which is when multiple high-quality sources on the web all agree on the same fact....

See our discussion here...

Google Says its AI (MUM) Now Makes Better Consensus of Featured Snippets
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5070866.htm [webmasterworld.com]

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Also see, very much related, news of the "Helpful Content Update", to begin rolling out Aug 21, 2022... , beginning to discussed here...

Google To Release "Helpful Content Update" From 21 August
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5070615.htm
[webmasterworld.com]

Some basic changes are being implemented.