Bad Reviews will hurt search results - from google

Interesting read, I didn't realize google ever offered so much transparency on these types of subjects.

What I would take away from this is, like in your personal credit report(FICO score) - the more negative things add up, they will tip the scale.  One bad thing mixed with a lot of good, still will show you worthy of a search result.

More bad than good could bump you down the results in a significant way.

here is the whole article --

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/being-bad-to-your-customers-is-bad-for.html

Being bad to your customers is bad for business

A recent article by the New York Times related a disturbing story. By treating your customers badly, one merchant told the paper, you can generate complaints and negative reviews that translate to more links to your site; which, in turn, make it more prominent in search engines. The main premise of the article was that being bad on the web can be good for business.

We were horrified to read about Ms. Rodriguez’s dreadful experience. Even though our initial analysis pointed to this being an edge case and not a widespread problem in our search results, we immediately convened a team that looked carefully at the issue. That team developed an initial algorithmic solution, implemented it, and the solution is already live. I am here to tell you that being bad is, and hopefully will always be, bad for business in Google’s search results.

As always, we learned a lot from this experience, and we wanted to share some of that with you. Consider the obvious responses we could have tried to fix the problem:

Block the particular offender. That would be easy and might solve the immediate problem for that specific business, but it wouldn’t solve the larger issue in a general way.

--click through to google for complete article ---