Do Dislikes Affect YouTube Video Search Rankings or is it a Myth?

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Michael

Michael

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This is something I have wondered about for a while now, I know a lot of people here have always said that dislikes actually help your video as it counts as interaction and engagement but does it really signal to YouTube that people are engaging on your videos and therefore the video should be ranked better in some way? Are they weighed out against likes or something by their algorithm? Does anyone have a source where YouTube have said dislikes help videos rank better or is it all repeated myth? Does YouTube check for those who abuse the dislike system and use multiple accounts to dislike a video because I see that all too often on newer channels, hopefully theyre penalised in some way or another where their likes dont have as much signal strength or something like that.

What are your thoughts on this?
 
It should help just as much as likes do, because it counts as engagement. There are a lot of videos that have high dislike:like ratios but still ranked decently on the system. I honestly think it is just a myth.
 
I have no idea, i have 4 dislikes and 1 like on my video with 517 views, so im not really sure - it shows up when i type relevant things to do with the video, so im guessing no?
 
YouTube probably won't make an official statement on it because of concerns people will game the system. But I'm with Dislikes being counted as an engagment with the same points as dislikes. There's a lot of theories about why it works that way, 1s that are very logical too.

  • First is that there's no way to guarantee a like or dislike is genuine, people could like a video for the hell of it the same way they could dislike a video for the hell of it, this means that content creators could be effected in unnecessarily negative ways if the system is used poorly, so the easiest solution is to count them as 1 engagement i.e. a like is worth the same points as a dislike, no negative points or points deducted.
  • There's another theory that YouTube believed large amounts of dislikes could also signify a controversial topic being discussed and naturally media companies love controversy because it means popularity, therefore they once again count them as the same engagement.
  • I also imagine given that YouTube haven't made a statement, someone, at least 1 person would have tested out the ranking system with many varying factors and compared many different variations of factors, likes and dislikes being 2 of them, the people who do that are most likely the people who charge others for tutorials on that kind of thing. There are people out there that test things for the hell of it.
YouTube do combat quite a lot of issues on the engagement end (the retention system was 1 but they had to mention that), so I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if someone confirmed the dislike thing 100%. For me, I think the only way it affects a video is if someone sees more dislikes than likes it may sway them to judge the video in a negative way prior to watching or after watching.
 
Michael said:
This is something I have wondered about for a while now, I know a lot of people here have always said that dislikes actually help your video as it counts as interaction and engagement but does it really signal to YouTube that people are engaging on your videos and therefore the video should be ranked better in some way? Are they weighed out against likes or something by their algorithm? Does anyone have a source where YouTube have said dislikes help videos rank better or is it all repeated myth? Does YouTube check for those who abuse the dislike system and use multiple accounts to dislike a video because I see that all too often on newer channels, hopefully theyre penalised in some way or another where their likes dont have as much signal strength or something like that.

What are your thoughts on this?
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I believe that they do affect your video. Dislikes are sort of counted as likes. So, YouTube will rank your video up higher even if you have, for example, 3 likes and 100 dislikes on your video. You gain a lot of traction, comments, and audience retention, so it's not necessarily a bad thing.
 
I think that dislikes count and help... but not as much as Likes do. Hugely popular videos also tend to have a lot of Likes. But that's also attributed to well-liked videos being more likely to be shared. I've got some highly viewed videos with a lot of dislikes.
 
Ive never actualy thought about that. But now im reading this im thinking about this video on my channel. I dont have that many subcribers or video's that go over 500 views so i dont have that many likes/dislikes. But 1 video on my channel got 2 dislikes a while back and all of a sudden the views went up to over a 1000. (wich for me is a milestone in my life haha :tongue:) So maybe thats no reference but it gets me thinking that this might be true somewhere!
 
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