Stars, Ratings & Surveys Not A Google Ranking Factor

Jun 14, 2018 - 7:42 am 8 by

Gray Google Star

Google's John Mueller said in a webmaster hangout video at the 24:43 minute mark that Google does not use survey data, ratings, reviews, stars, etc in their organic ranking factors. He said he cannot speak if they use it in local search, which they do, but for organic natural ten blue link results, Google does not use such metrics.

"We don't use the content that we see in surveys as as a ranking factor," John said. He said there are many reasons why they do not but one main reason is that they don't know the scale of the ratings, if one star is better than 5 or 10, etc.

Here is what John said:

We don't use the content that we see in surveys as as a ranking factor.

So if you have a survey on your site and currently it says you have like two stars, we're not going to rank your site lower because you have like something that says two stars on there. Because we also don't know what these two stars mean. It might be that one star is like the best and fewer star and more stars is something different. It's like it's really hard to tell. We don't know offhand there.

But in general we wouldn't rank them differently in the organic search results based on the star rankings.

It might be different with local search where you might have your Google My Business listing and you have reviews attached to that Google My Business listing but that's completely separate from the normal kind of organic search results that we have there.

Here is the video embed:

Forum discussion at YouTube.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Follow

Search Video Recaps

 
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Search Video Recaps

Search News Buzz Video Recap: Google Ranking Volatility Record, Forbes Advisor Slapped, Bing Generative Search Experience & More

Oct 4, 2024 - 8:01 am
Google

Google AI Overview Ads, New Link Format, AI Organized Search Results & More

Oct 4, 2024 - 7:55 am
Bing Search

Bing Testing Bing Button

Oct 4, 2024 - 7:51 am
Google Ads

Google Ads Send Message On WhatsApp Tests

Oct 4, 2024 - 7:41 am
Google Ads

Google Tests Local Services Ads Without Attorney Photos

Oct 4, 2024 - 7:31 am
Google

Google Search From The Web Carousel Cards

Oct 4, 2024 - 7:21 am
Previous Story: Google: Cache-Control Headers Do Not Impact GoogleBot