How Does Google Deal with Negative Reviews or Mentions
-
I would really like to get everyone's opinion on how you all think Google deals with negative reviews, or just mentions on negative websites. One of my clients has a page on a powerful negative website (one that is designed to shame all those on it), and no other real reviews around the web.
I have never seen any evidence that Google takes positive or negative reviews into account when ranking websites. But maybe one of you has?
Currently when you search for my client by name, the negative website comes up second, which is obviously embarrassing for them. If we sought out a whole load of positive (obviously genuine) reviews from happy clients, do you think this might influence the prominent placement of this negative website?
Also would it influence the ranking of the website in general? I would love to hear your opinions on this topic.
[BTW We have already explored the path of the right to be forgotten, but it seems to be inundated so we are not holding our breaths.]
-
Hi,
In my opinion, Google definitely does take certain reviews into account when ranking sites. What I mean by that, is reviews that can actually be measured numerically.
These are the two types of reviews that I believe affect rankings:
- Google + reviews
- Reviews using schema to markup the rating
Both the above can be easily measured by using the number of stars, points etc (which all represent a percentage out of 100%).
By using a very simple algorithm, you could collect this information from across the internet and calculate how well on average a particular website (this can also be done for products, recipes etc.) ranks with the public.
We have also had our fair share of negative reviews (it has to be expected) and have actively sought to increase our positive ones (honestly and naturally) to combat this. For us, it seems to have worked successfully.
What's your opinion on this?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Homepage disappeared from Google
Hello, Since 2 weeks, our website is losing positions in Google. After years on the first page, we dropped for our main keyword to the 3rd page. Seems that all the positions we lost, were ranking with the homepage. Now, we are on the 3rd page but with a less important page. How is it possible that only the homepage disappeared? Is there any explanation for that? I hope there is an explanation, so we can fix the trouble. Kind regards, Tine
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TineDL0 -
Reclaiming Ranking positions in Google
We have a website we are working on that was ranking well in Google but since having a hosting upgrade has completely dropped in rankings. When a hosting upgrade was made, the developer added an incorrect robots.txt file that restricted the site from being found, hence resulting in lost rankings. We have since sorted out that issue so the robots.txt is OK. However, ranking results have yet to be reclaimed. We are unsure why these rankings haven't rebounded back, as it has been a while now. The site is https://www.brightonpanelworks.com.au. We have since also attempted to add a sitemap however to help the site be better crawled and to regain rankings, however, it appears that sitemap generators are having problems creating a sitemap for this site and we are not sure why. And we are not sure whether this may relate to why Google has not picked up on pages and ranking results have not be restored. If you have any ideas as to how we can reclaim rankings to the strong positions they were in previously, that would be much appreciated. We believe we may be missing something here that is not allowing webpages to be picked up and ranked by Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
Google not Indexing images on CDN.
My URL is: http://bit.ly/1H2TArH We have set up a CDN on our own domain: http://bit.ly/292GkZC We have an image sitemap: http://bit.ly/29ca5s3 The image sitemap uses the CDN URLs. We verified the CDN subdomain in GWT. The robots.txt does not restrict any of the photos: http://bit.ly/29eNSXv. We used to have a disallow to /thumb/ which had a 301 redirect to our CDN but we removed both the disallow in the robots.txt as well as the 301. Yet, GWT still reports none of our images on the CDN are indexed. The above screenshot is from the GWT of our main domain.The GWT from the CDN subdomain just shows 0. We did not submit a sitemap to the verified subdomain property because we already have a sitemap submitted to the property on the main domain name. While making a search of images indexed from our CDN, nothing comes up: http://bit.ly/293ZbC1While checking the GWT of the CDN subdomain, I have been getting crawling errors, mainly 500 level errors. Not that many in comparison to the number of images and traffic that we get on our website. Google is crawling, but it seems like it just doesn't index the pictures!? Can anyone help? I have followed all the information that I was able to find on the web but yet, our images on the CDN still can't seem to get indexed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alphonseha0 -
Review website - multiple pages of reviews of same item
Hi - I've been looking at review websites like tripadvisor - I looked at Tripadvisor's hotel reviews and the reviews may extend for several pages, yet they don't change title tags and so on, on each of the multiple pages? Surely it would be a good idea, from an SEO perspective, to change title tags (and perhaps other tags) for each of the multiple pages - even if the change was slight - e.g. "The White Swan Hotel - Reviews p 1" - "The White Swan Hotel - Reviews p 2" and so on? Am I missing something?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Dealing with Canonical tag in volusion
Hi We have an ecommerce site where we have some returns/scratch /dented products identical to the original one. The onpage content of the damaged/original is pretty much identical with the damaged just having a describing the damage. I had wanted to make a canonical tag on the damaged product to the original so it would not be a problem of duplicate content but as it is a volusion site we dont have that option - it only canonicalizes back to itself! Any ideas what else I can do - cant really change the content much and I dont really want to deindex it so people find it? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | henya0 -
Google Local oddity
So I spotted something a little weird... one of my client's Google Local placements in blended results has the domain name - complete with the .com extension appearing where the business name typically appears: Businessxyz.com www. businessxyz .com of Google reviews Has anyone seen this? I setup their Google Places account quite some time ago and used the business name - not the url. I also setup their Google+ and Local page - using the name. None of the page titles on the website contain the url. I simply can not pinpoint where G is pulling this from or why for that matter. All competitors are appearing with business name - only my client has the domain name visible for the particular local search query. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SCW0 -
Review of on page SEO - Please help
Hi I am new to SEOmoz but can see a lot of great information going back and forth. I am looking for a little help with the SEO on our site and looking for suggestions on what to do to improve it. We have some pages where we aggregate content from our database such as this: http://www.touristlink.com/india/nagpur/cat/temples.html It would seem that "Temples in Nagpur" is not that competitive of a term but we dont show up until page 4. Any on page suggestions on what we could do to improve? Or any mistakes we are making. All the content on the site is fairly new as in 6 months even though the site has been established and online for a number of years. We have not done any specific linking building for the term "Temples in Nagpur" Any suggestions on the overall structure of the site would also be great. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidUrmann0 -
Getting rid of a site in Google
Hi, I have two sites, lets call them site A and site B, both are sub domains of the same root domain. Because of a server config error, both got indexed by Google. Google reports millions of inbound links from Site B to Site A I want to get rid of Site B, because its duplicate content. First I tried to remove the site from webmaster tools, and blocking all content in the robots.txt for site B, this removed all content from the search results, but the links from site B to site A still stayed in place, and increased (even after 2 months) I also tried to change all the pages on Site B to 404 pages, but this did not work either I then removed the blocks, cleaned up the robots.txt and changed the server config on Site B so that everything redirects (301) to a landing page for Site B. But still the links in Webmaster Tools to site A from Site B is on the increase. What do you think is the best way to delete a site from google and to delete all the links it had to other sites so that there is NO history of this site? It seems that when you block it with robots.txt, the links and juice does not disappear, but only the blocked by robots.txt report on WMT increases Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JacoRoux0