Google's John Mueller was asked if Google's algorithm can associate negative factors with people or organizations that would lead the unrelated site to be downgraded in their search results. John said he doesn't believe Google has such an algorithm but then explores other possibilities.
At the 27:32 mark into the video hangout, a site owner asked John "Does the algorithm possibly associate negative factors with either people or organizations and then downgrade unrelated websites that are associated with the same people?"
John then asked him for more details, and the question expanded:
Basically like we've had the issues with car buying tips and then one of my partners and I have a hobby type site related to stone crab searching. And it had rank when we put it up, it was ranking in the top three on anything related and then it kind of disappeared from the rankings.We posted a question on the webmaster help forum and within like minutes the top contributors all started focusing on the fact that the site had associations with car buying tips. And so I wanted to see if it's possible that there's some kind of a negative connotation somehow attached to us personal.
John responded that he can't imagine that that is something Google would do. He said "I can't imagine that there's something attached to you personally were our algorithms would say oh man this guy again."
He then went to expand on other possibilities:
So you usually where that comes in is if we see a website and it's kind of well interlinked set of sites that are all problematic. Then that might be something or algorithm goes oh we got to be careful here. All of these websites are problematic, so maybe this new website that's also part of this set is also kind of tricky.But if if it's a matter of these websites just being on the same server, with the same owner, that's that's usually not a problem.
It's also generally more of a problem when it goes into the direction of doorway pages. Where maybe you're creating a new website for hundreds of different cities across the country. And essentially all these pages are the same, like all of the websites are the same. And that's something where our algorithms might say well this doesn't look like a lot of value for for us.
But in this specific case, "where they're completely unrelated topics, they're not linked to each other at all" he asked, John Mueller said he doesn't see it to be a problem.
Here is the video embed:
Forum discussion at YouTube.
