This is interesting:
How Negative Emotion Could Hurt Your Rankings
Google Knows When You’re (Un)Happy
There are dozens of potential uses of stylometry and lexical analysis to improve search quality. Just as Google uses surrounding words to identify what kind of jack I’m talking about, the search engine could also use context to determine whether the adjectives I use in reference to a product, place, or post are positive or negative. . . .
Hundreds of examples prove that Google is picking important sentiments from external websites – not just from review sites like Yelp, but also from sites that don’t necessarily focus on user-generated reviews. Further monitoring over time may be required to properly assess impact on local rankings. It seems clear to me, though, that Google would not go to the effort of determining whether a sentiment was positive or negative and then apply for a patent unless the information is being used in some way. . . .
It would follow that positive citations would improve local rankings, while negative citations could harm rankings.
I think it's likely that Google will do this if they aren't already...
12 years
Agreed.
I believe it goes even further, After statistically figuring out the posters personal happiness quotient, they then direct Ads in relation to it to the poster. Say you rate high on the PPHQ (Really happy) the Ads you get would be a bit more up market in terms of pricing..
9 years
Google recommends websites use a specific format when publishing reviews, it's called a micro-format - rich snipppets. It's quite an involved job to get a programmer to develop this for your website, so we've made a really economical review platform for you, ready built to rich snippets format.
InnovaReviews.com enables you to publish guest reviews on your website quickly and easily, and control which reviews are published, unlike TripAdvisor that publish the good, bad and the terrible!
Google also give businesses using this rich snippets format (the one we have your reviews in) the review stars in the search results, which really helps people see your hostel in the search results.
9 years
Sounds very interesting. (People who haven't heard of microformats can check out some posts about it here and here, though they contain outdated information.)
The FAQ page says:
Do i get a free webpage?
Yes! In addition to the review window to pop in your website you get your own business profile page, courtesy of us! The profile page displays your branding and business details, and has a URL of it's own, example innovareviews.com/yourbusiness.
How do the embedded reviews increase hostels' rankings? Are they rendered with JavaScript and is Google able to read the JS? Or does the structured data only appear in the SERPs for the microsite?
9 years
Shame that Paul didn't respond, as it's an interesting topic.
The issue with planting only 5 star reviews is obviously credibility - this is why people turn to TripAdvisor, HostelWorld and friends.
Having only positive reviews looks fake. This article http://blog.crazyegg.com/2015/09/29/negative-reviews/]right here goes into the subject:
Every time I’ve looked at the reviews for products and see nothing but over zealous positivity I think one thing. Scam.
Anyone who’s been involved in business before can attest to the fact that things do, and will, go wrong at some point. No company has a 100% record of success and happy customers. When you see nothing but five star reviews you start to question the legitimacy of the business.
Are they censoring negative reviews? If so, how many? Are they paying people to provide fake reviews? Are they creating fake reviews themselves? It all leads to a lowering of trust in your brand.
According to a study by Revoo 30% of readers suspect censorship or fake reviews when shopping online. On the other side of the coin, 68% of customers trust reviews more when there’s a healthy mix of both positive and negative reviews.
If you're going to go down this kind of path, I have a different recomendation.
It's possible to send guests to an internal page on your site to ask for feedback. A simple question - 'were you happy with your stay with us?' does the trick. Those who say yes get shown a message asking them to submit a review to HostelWorld or TripAdvisor. Those who didn't enjoy their stay get directed to an internal feedback form and have their issues sorted out by management. This is not something we have implemented for our web design customers - YET - but if the demand exists we will do it.
Credibility IS a very important topic, which is why your website should be stuffed full of credibility indicators. Which? Read my post here on the topic.
Back to the original post, Moz has an expert compiled list of local ranking factors right here, as judged by world-leading experts. You'll see that the sentiment of reviews absolutely does play a part, but other factors are much more important. I'd say that one should worry less about the Google effect of negative reviews - if you get 100 negative reviews, the low rankings in HostelWorld, Booking, TripAdvisor etc will kill you much faster than Google could.
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