Google's John Mueller confirmed yesterday in a video hangout that Google does not use the BBB, Better Business Bureaus score or reviews as well as other third-party trust sites in their ranking algorithm. So all that talk about making sure you have a good BBB score with the core updates is really completely unrelated to core search rankings.
Of course, you want to make sure your business has a good reputation when someone Googles it. But at the same time, to think Google's search ranking algorithms use third-party scores for ranking web sites is something that doesn't make much sense. Supposedly some SEOs were thinking Google would use these scores as part of their algorithms but John Mueller from Google confirmed yesterday that Google does not.
John said "we wouldn't use something like the BBB score" for search rankings he said. Here is the video embed of where John first started talking about this 15:30 mark:
Here is the transcript:
In the past you explained that Googlebot or Google is not researching author backgrounds expertise etc. Can you say the same thing for site reputation and Better Business Bureaus scores? For example, some believe that BBB ratings and reviews are used algorithmically with the latest core updates. That doesn't make sense since the BBB is only for the US, Mexico and Canada. I can't imagine that Google would use a single source like that algorithmically when its algorithms are mainly global in nature.I would venture to guess that you are correct. That we wouldn't use something like the BBB score for something like this. As far as I know that's certainly the case.
There are various kind of issues with regards to some of these sources of information, about a business, about a website and we need to make sure that we're really reflecting what we think is actually relevant for users. Rather than blindly relying on some third parties ratings.
Google said also over a year ago that adding trust building seals or logos to your site has no impact on rankings.
Hat tip to @glenngabe for asking this question to John.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
