Do cuss words on social media sites affect ranking?

[kwoolf]

This is a hard one, I'm sure. In regards to search, I've read that Facebook pays close attention to verbs and that Google takes into account related words close to anchor text and search terms.

Now I have the unique opportunity to work as the internet sales and marketing consultant for a company in serious need of brand reputation repair. The company has experienced a terrible fallout from a recent product recall. Unfortunately in this case, the company site has really strong reach, which means that our blog posts, product descriptions, and twitter comments can be found copied on hundreds of websites hours after they are posted.

The most recent incident has associated our brand name with words like cheaters, scam, phoney, copycat, and other words that will certainly get filtered here. All my attempts to assure unconditional refunds and offer phone support get labeled as a desperate attempt to save the brand. No doubt, the company has issues but will surely overcome them in time.

SEO Question: Should I close the Facebook page and set strong filters on a new page to delete the onslaught of negative comments or should we spend the time to clean up the current page? This is a difficult decision, as I know many companies like Hubspot, Mailchimp, and Rackspace actually look at Facebook pages to qualify business leads (no fans, go home).

Damage control suggestions also welcome, but the crux of this issue here is how our brand name and product names will be associated with cuss words or negative terms and how this will affect our ranking in SERPs.

[kwoolf]

Been spending a little more time in the Moz community recently and though to update this post. In case anybody finds themselves in a similar spot: http://googleblog.blogspot.tw/2010/12/being-bad-to-your-customers-is-bad-for.html

This company I mentioned did a fine job of pivoting and grew from $500K to over $8M since I asked this question.

[loopyal]

Hello Kevin. Yes hard question to answer. When other sites pick up content related to you, you have little control. If someone likes to put a negative slant on everything you do, that is very hard to combat. You need to fix the issues that cause this ASAP and if you can, get people to tell their story about the company response. Then you need to stay out of trouble. After that you need truthful positive press with wise distribution and positive social signals.