How important are "example.com review" results?

[Tonearm]

Has anyone been able to determine how important "example.com review" results are in the search engines? My site has no reviews online except for one that showed up a few days ago and it is negative. Unfortunately it appears in the #1 spot for the above query. Nothing negative appears in the meta description or title, but if it's clicked the user can see it.

The thing is, orders have dropped considerably since the day the review showed up.

[Tonearm]

No thoughts on this?

[dpd1]

I've never even heard of it until now, so I don't see how it can be the reason why you had that kind of drop. There was a low point these last few days. I barely had any sales as well.

[MisterT]

This is definitely important. Unless you are big established brand, customers will search for reviews on your business. Even established brands have to deal with this. You should monitor search results and try to encourage positive reviews. Ask customers to leave reviews, and ask you friends/relatives that have been customers to also leave honest (hopefully positive) reviews. Don't cheat, just get the good feedback you deserve. Now if the negative reviews are deserved I'm not sure what to say... :)

[HRoth]

I would not believe your order drop would be from that one review. Perhaps it depends on the business, but I have seen businesses with massive amounts of negative reviews online and yet they are going strong. I used to worry about this myself until I saw, for instance, a company that on one site had nothing but negative reviews, over 150 of them. And yet they are not only tops in the rankings for various keywords but they are obviously going strong, even though they do things like ship no products at all, give no refunds, send things that are supposed to be alive that are dead, charge more than they say they are going to, etc. They have an F with the BBB. Doesn't make any difference, apparently. I even saw them recommended in a recent book as a source the other day.