What Happens When You
Overlook Reddit
— The Heyshape Story
Heyshape is a major brand in the body shaping niche. If you're not familiar with them, they target curvy women with shapewear and body-confidence products — a space with a passionate, vocal audience and a lot of organic conversation happening online every single day.
They have a strong Instagram presence. They do paid ads. They're clearly not a small operation.
And yet, on May 20, 2026, when you Google their own brand name — "heyshape" — this is what shows up on the first page, sitting right below their Instagram:
A Reddit thread. On the first page of Google. For their own brand name. Right below their Instagram.
What's Inside the Thread?
It's not a glowing review. It's not a community of fans sharing their favourite products.
It's a negative thread — complaints, bad experiences, and exactly the kind of content that makes a prospective customer click away before they ever reach Heyshape's website.
How Long Has This Been Happening?
The first time we checked this search result was 11 months ago. At the time, the thread was sitting at #7 on the first page of Google.
That alone should have been a fire alarm.
Today, it hasn't gone away. It's still there. It has been ranking on Google's first page for a branded search — the most high-intent, bottom-of-funnel search a person can make — for at least a year.
Think about that: every person who Googled "heyshape" in the last 12 months saw a negative Reddit thread before they landed on Heyshape's own content. That's not a blip. That's a conversion leak running in the background, silently, every single day.
The Part That Makes It Worse
Here's where it gets particularly grim: the subreddit moderators have archived the thread.
Archiving means the post is frozen. No new comments can be posted. No one can respond, provide context, defend the brand, share positive experiences, or add anything that might dilute the negativity.
In other words — that thread is now a perfectly preserved, glass-encased monument to bad PR. A museum exhibit of complaints, locked behind velvet rope, where visitors can stare but nobody can touch anything. Google loves it. Heyshape cannot touch it.
Can Anything Be Done?
Yes. And it's not complicated.
The fix doesn't involve taking that thread down — you can't. Reddit doesn't remove threads on request, and Google indexes what it wants. Trying to fight the existing post is the wrong battle entirely.
The right move is to make that thread irrelevant.
By creating new, SEO-optimised Reddit threads — discussions that are genuinely useful, that match the search intent behind "heyshape," and that carry the right signals — you can give Google better, fresher content to index. Pair that with targeted relevance signals and you shift what Google considers the most authoritative result for that query.
The negative thread doesn't disappear overnight. But it gets pushed down, diluted, outcompeted. New threads that you control start to fill the space — threads that show real community engagement, real positive experiences, and real answers to the questions prospective customers are actually asking.
Google doesn't rank threads because they're old. It ranks them because it thinks they're the most relevant result for a query. Change what it thinks is relevant, and you change what it shows.
Heyshape is a big brand with real resources. This is fixable. The fact that it hasn't been fixed yet is simply a matter of not knowing this lever exists — or assuming Reddit is something you can't control.
You can.
Is a Negative Reddit Thread
Ranking for Your Brand?
We'll audit your branded search results and show you exactly what's ranking — and what it would take to fix it.