The other day I reported that Google said negative reviews on the web about your brand or business won't hurt your rankings in Google search. Yesterday, I was on the video call with John Mueller and I asked him this question and brought up the Decor My Eyes case from ten years ago. He then said he can see if a brand has a ton of negative reviews, algorithms would pick up on that and the site might not rank as well.
The thing is, he made it sound more to me about the overall core ranking algorithm. He made it sound like a brand with tons of bad reviews probably will reflect that on how it builds its site and how users interact with that site. But I am not sure.
At the 3:05 mark into the video call, I asked John about this, here is the video embed. I am not going to transcribe it, I will use Glenn Gabe's tweets as a summary:
Via @johnmu: If all signals point in that direction (overwhelming negative reviews and info about a company), then John could imagine that Google's algorithms could pick that up. It's pretty rare that would happen, but it can. https://t.co/qdgDJHjVxs pic.twitter.com/c2g73jV5AH
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) August 5, 2020
And regarding what Google implemented algorithmically in 2010, John said that Google probably does have something similar that's active (although 10 years is a long time and it has probably evolved since then). So yes, overwhelming negative sentiment can impact rankings. pic.twitter.com/PZFKIYyFSt
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) August 5, 2020
Watch the video, what do you think? Let me know. I mean, let me know what you think of what John said, not the awesome GIF selections in the tweets above.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
