A supplement claiming to support joint mobility in senior cats sat on our test shelf for six weeks last spring before we wrote a single word about it. We logged which of our cats touched it, how much, and whether anything changed. That six-week wait is not an accident or a delay — it is the review process itself.

Scope of This Review Policy MyNorwegianCat

Consider this the answer key. This Review Policy MyNorwegianCat page explains exactly how the 20 product reviews on this site are selected, scored, sourced, and updated. It is the page our Disclaimer and Affiliate Disclosure each point to when they mention "our review methodology" instead of repeating it. If a review on this site ever contradicts what is written here, this page describes the standard we intend to meet, and we would want to know about the gap.

What Qualifies a Product for Review

The bar described in this Review Policy MyNorwegianCat page is deliberately not "everything a brand sends us." Not every product marketed at Norwegian Forest Cat owners makes it onto our list. A product qualifies for review when it is realistically available to buy in the United States or United Kingdom, when it is specific enough to test or research meaningfully rather than a vague category, and when there is enough reader interest or search demand for the product that a review would actually help someone decide. Products that fail basic safety screening, such as ingredients flagged as unsafe by veterinary sources, are excluded outright rather than reviewed and scored low.

How Reviews Relate to Our Hub Pages

Our six hub pages cover broad topics — grooming, nutrition, health, and so on — and often link out to specific reviews that go deeper on one product within that topic. The hub gives you the landscape; the review, scored against the rubric in this Review Policy MyNorwegianCat page, gives you the specific verdict on one option within it. Neither replaces the other.

A friend once asked why we bothered with numbers at all — why not just say "we like this one" and move on. The honest answer is that "we like this one" hides too much. A product can be excellent value and mediocre quality at the same time; a harness can be perfectly safe and a poor fit for a Norwegian Forest Cat's dense undercoat. This Review Policy MyNorwegianCat page exists because a single verdict flattens exactly the kind of nuance a reader actually needs before spending money on their cat.

Our five-category scoring rubric, published in full.

Our Scoring Rubric

Every review on this site is scored against the same five categories, weighted the same way every time:

Breed Suitability (30%): How well the product fits the specific traits of Norwegian Forest Cats — their coat, size, activity level, and common breed tendencies.
Value (20%): Price relative to quantity, durability, or effect, compared with realistic alternatives.
Quality (20%): Build quality, ingredient quality, or material quality, based on research and, where applicable, hands-on testing.
Safety (15%): Whether the product carries any known risk, recall history, or ingredient concern.
Owner Experience (15%): How the product performs day to day, based on our own use or well-documented owner reports.

We publish this formula because a rubric only builds trust if readers can actually see it, not just be told a score exists.

What "Why Trust This Review" Means

Every review on this site includes a short “Why Trust This Review” note, and this Review Policy MyNorwegianCat page is where that phrase gets its full explanation rather than a one-line summary. It exists because Google’s own Search Quality Rater Guidelines treat a review from someone who has actually used a product as worth more than a “review” from someone who has not.

That note states plainly whether hands-on testing happened, how long, and with how many cats, so you are not left guessing at the difference between direct experience and secondhand research.

How we weigh manufacturer claims against hands-on observation.

Evidence Tiers We Use

Sourcing is where this Review Policy MyNorwegianCat page gets most specific, because not every claim in a review carries the same weight, and we try not to blur that distinction. We treat manufacturer documentation as a starting point for ingredients, specifications, and intended use, not as an independent verification of anything. We treat established breed standards and veterinary literature as the baseline for what is generally true of Norwegian Forest Cats as a breed.

We treat our own hands-on observation, and well-documented reports from other owners, as the most specific evidence available, though it is also the evidence most likely to vary from one cat to the next. When a review states a claim, the source behind it should be inferable from context, even if we do not footnote every sentence.

A Note on Testing With Real Cats

Our test group is small — a handful of Norwegian Forest Cats, not a lab of a hundred. This Review Policy MyNorwegianCat page does not pretend that is a large sample, and it isn't one. What it gives up in statistical scale, it makes up in depth: we see the same cats react to the same product over weeks, not a single trial run, and that pattern of repeated, ordinary observation is exactly what "Owner Experience" in the rubric above is measuring.

How and When We Update a Review

This is the part of this Review Policy MyNorwegianCat page that keeps a published review honest over time. Products change. A supplement gets reformulated, a price drops, a retailer discontinues a size, or new information emerges about an ingredient. When we learn that something has changed, we update the review rather than leaving an outdated score live; the date at the top of each review reflects the most recent check, not just the original publish date. We do not have a fixed re-testing schedule for every product, but a formulation change or a safety concern moves a review to the front of the queue.

Editorial Independence in Scoring

This is the one-sentence version of a bigger promise made elsewhere: this Review Policy MyNorwegianCat page’s rubric is applied the same way no matter who is watching. No manufacturer, retailer, or affiliate relationship changes a score. The full statement of that principle, including how advertising and affiliate income relate to editorial decisions, is in our Disclaimer and our Affiliate Disclosure; this Review Policy MyNorwegianCat page only confirms that the rubric above is applied the same way regardless of whether a review contains an affiliate link.

What to do if your experience does not match our score.

If You Disagree With a Score

This Review Policy MyNorwegianCat page would be dishonest if it implied our scores are beyond question. If you have used a product we reviewed and your experience does not match ours, we want to hear about it, and disagreement alone does not mean either of us is wrong — cats vary, and so does owner experience. Tell us specifically which category of the rubric you think we got wrong and why, using real detail rather than a general complaint, and we will look at the review again with that in mind.

Changes to This Review Policy

This Review Policy MyNorwegianCat page is not meant to be static any more than the reviews it governs are. We may update it as our testing process matures or as the rubric itself is refined. The date at the top of this page reflects the most recent revision, and any change to the rubric weights themselves would apply going forward, not retroactively rewrite scores already published.

Contact Us

If you have questions about this Review Policy MyNorwegianCat page, about how a specific review was scored, or want to flag new information about a reviewed product, contact Nina Fentanes, publisher and legal representative, at [email protected]. That is also where you can tell us if something we published does not match what you are seeing with your own cat — which, in the end, is the only test that actually matters to you.

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