Google now supports new structured data for pros and cons of editorial review pages. This new markup can be validated in the Rich Results testing tool and other Search Console tools (I assume).
Also, Google will prioritize supplied structured data provided by you over automatically extracted data for pros and cons that Google previously showed in Google Search. So it probably makes sense for you to tell Google what pros and cons you want to display in Google Search over Google trying to guess.
When you markup your pros and cons, Google may (or may not) show this rich results markup for your snippets. It would look like this:
The help doc for Google product structured data has been updated to mention pros and cons saying “Pros and cons: Help people see a high-level summary of the pros and cons of an editorial product review.” “While Google tries to automatically understand the pros and cons of an editorial product review, you can explicitly provide this information by adding the positiveNotes and/or negativeNotes properties to your nested product review. Be sure to follow the pros and cons guidelines,” Google added.
If you add pros and cons this structured data, you must follow these guidelines, Google said:
- Currently, only editorial product review pages are eligible for the pros and cons appearance in Search, not merchant product pages or customer product reviews.
- There must be at least two statements about the product. It can be any combination of positive and/or negative statements (for example, ItemList markup with two positive statements is valid).
- The pros and cons must be visible to users on the page.
The pros and cons appearance is available in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish in all countries where Google Search is available.
Some interesting feedback from the SEO community:
This is sort of opposite of how you would think it would go… I could see SD first, then handle algorithmically based on improving their systems. They started algorithmically doing it, and now implementing SD. So they are clearly not happy with the algorithmic solution (yet)
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) August 5, 2022
This is extracting more than writing, though. I have several clients where pros/cons are being displayed in the SERPs. Should be interesting to see how this goes for them once the SD is added.
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) August 5, 2022
A reminder: You can tell Google about the pros and cons of *a* product, but not *your* product. This is only relevant for product review pages rather than PDPs. https://t.co/rIG7PTiMQ2
— Nati Elimelech (@Netanel) August 5, 2022
Forum discussion at Twitter.
