Google’s John Mueller was asked if Google’s algorithm can associate negative factors with people or organizations that would lead the unrelated site to be downgraded in their search results. John said he doesn’t believe Google has such an algorithm but then explores other possibilities.

At the 27:32 mark into the video hangout, a site owner asked John “Does the algorithm possibly associate negative factors with either people or organizations and then downgrade unrelated websites that are associated with the same people?”

John then asked him for more details, and the question expanded:

John responded that he can’t imagine that that is something Google would do. He said “I can’t imagine that there’s something attached to you personally were our algorithms would say oh man this guy again.”

He then went to expand on other possibilities:

But in this specific case, “where they’re completely unrelated topics, they’re not linked to each other at all” he asked, John Mueller said he doesn’t see it to be a problem.

Here is the video embed:

Forum discussion at YouTube.