User generated content (Comments) - What impact do they have?
-
Hello MOZ stars!
I have a question regarding user comments on article pages. I know that user generated content is good for SEO, but how much impact does it really have?
For your information:
1 - All comments appears in source code and is crawled by spiders.
2 - A visitor can comment a page for up to 60 days.
3 - The amount of comments depends on the topic, we usually gets between 3-40 comments.My question:
1 - If we were to remove comments completely, what impact would it have from seo perspective? (I know you cant be certain - but please make an educated guess if possible)
2 - If it has a negative and-/or positive impact please specify why!If anything is unclear or you want certain information don't hesitate to ask and I'll try to specify.
Best regards,
Danne -
Not what you asked, but other than SEO I would say comments do have an effect. I have heard advertisers say they were looking for sites with comments. Their thinking was they wanted popular sites with followers and they is how they judged it.
-
I do think that negative comments hurt UX and eventually the bottom line. No one wants to work with a company that has ton of negative feedback. Which is exactly why user generated content is so important to the searchers. It is a candid review of a company or product. There can be in the middle reviews, like a 3 star rating because customer service was great but the product stinks. I think those kinds of comments and reviews are necessary and overall good for UX.
In my opinion as a consumer, I want to see the bad comments. I always use the example of shoes and clothes. I don't want to find out when I get a pair of shoes in the mail that the sizes run a little small. If I see that in the comments or reviews ahead of time I will know to buy a size bigger and save myself the trouble of returning the product. These kinds of "negative" reviews are useful to a searcher and I wouldn't remove them.
-
Additional to what David said, I would still consider leaving the comments option open (until there is no "over-usage").
Also a factor to consider (especially in Barry's case), what kind of comments do people post. Do they have a positive or a negative annotation? Are they on-topic or not?
If you have a community, like Moz has IMO, where I see a lot of good, complementing comments, responses to each of the posts, I'd consider indexing the comments.
What do you think? David, Monica?
-
I also read that article. Barry seemed to think that the comments were hurting the site, rather than helping. Comments can get off topic, or stray away from the original article. If I remember correctly, Barry made the comments viewable, but not readable by Google as a result.
For return traffic, I think comments are great. After seeing the results that Barry shared, I'm not sure if it is still a good idea to have them included in the page crawl.
Here is the article that he spoke about this: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-ser-poll-19675.html
IMO, I would leave the comments on the pages, but block them from being indexed/use javascript for showing the comments if possible.
-
Like I have mentioned in my response, that is one case.
But I must agree with Monica, you should place the value to the searchers&User Experience.
-
User generated content in my opinion is extremely useful. It is unique, it is informative most of the time and it is valuable to future searches. In this instance I would be more concerned about the value to the searchers and to user experience than the SEO effects.
-
Hi Danne,
I remember reading a post about this from Barry Schwartz on seroundtable.com: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-ser-hurt-comments-19652.html
Read it through, it quite describes the effect of user generated content (specially comments).
This is one specific case, I am sure that it is not a general rule for this.
Gr., Keszi
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
User intent
Hello, For the keyword Normandy cycling, it seems according to the result that people are looking for the bike routes. My question : can i rank indicating my favorite bike routes (personal routes) or doIi need to stick to what is already considered as the best biking routes in Normandy, the tour de Manche, the veloscenic, the velo Francette and so forth ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Content or Backlinks
HI I have resource issues and need to prioritise my time, I know both content & backlinks are important for SEO, but where will it be most beneficial to spend my time? We are a generalist site, so this also makes things tougher. I have some core areas to work on, but want to be the most effective in the time I spend on them. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Google Authorship: Having others write content and authorship link to/from G+ profiles Impact Ranking?
Hi all! I am considering having several others write content for a new website and authorship link each to/from G+ profiles. Any idea of how that will Impact page/website ranking? I would think it would give more credibility to each page, and the website as a whole. No?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBuck0 -
Opinions on Boilerplate Content
Howdy, Ideally, uniqueness for every page's title, description, and content is desired. But when a site is very, very large, it becomes impossible. I don't believe our site can avoid boilerplate content for title tags or meta-descriptions. We will, however, markup the pages with proper microdata so Google can use this information as they please. What I am curious about is boilerplate content repeated throughout the site for the purpose of helping the user, as well as to tell Google what the page is about (rankings). For instance, this page and this page offer the same type of services, but in different areas. Both pages (and millions of others) offer the exact same paragraph on each page. The information is helpful to the user, but it's definitely duplicate content. All they've changed is the city name. I'm curious, what's making this obvious duplicate content issue okay? The additional unique content throughout (in the form of different businesses), the small, yet obvious differences in on-site content (title tags clearly represent different locations), or just the fact that the site is HUGELY authorative and gets away with it? I'm very curious to hear your opinions on this practice, potential ways to avoid it, and whether or not it's a passable practice for large, but new sites. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirmeliux0 -
Best practice for expandable content
We are in the middle of having new pages added to our website. On our website we will have a information section containing various details about a product, this information will be several paragraphs long. we were wanting to show the first paragraph and have a read more button to show the rest of the content that is hidden. Whats googles view on this, is this bad for seo?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexogilvie0 -
Duplicate content mess
One website I'm working with keeps a HTML archive of content from various magazines they publish. Some articles were repeated across different magazines, sometimes up to 5 times. These articles were also used as content elsewhere on the same website, resulting in up to 10 duplicates of the same article on one website. With regards to the 5 that are duplicates but not contained in the magazine, I can delete (resulting in 404) all but the highest value of each (most don't have any external links). There are hundreds of occurrences of this and it seems unfeasible to 301 or noindex them. After seeing how their system works I can canonical the remaining duplicate that isn't contained in the magazine to the corresponding original magazine version - but I can't canonical any of the other versions in the magazines to the original. I can't delete the other duplicates as they're part of the content of a particular issue of a magazine. The best thing I can think of doing is adding a link in the magazine duplicates to the original article, something along the lines of "This article originally appeared in...", though I get the impression the client wouldn't want to reveal that they used to share so much content across different magazines. The duplicate pages across the different magazines do differ slightly as a result of the different Contents menu for each magazine. Do you think it's a case of what I'm doing will be better than how it was, or is there something further I can do? Is adding the links enough? Thanks. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford0 -
Category Content Duplication
Does indexing category archive page for a blog cause duplications? http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success After reading this article I am unsure.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
I have a duplicate content problem
The website guy that made the website for my business Premier Martial Arts Austin disappeared and didn't set up that www. was to begin each URL, so I now have a duplicate content problem and don't want to be penalized for it. I tried to show in Webmaster tools the preferred setup but can't get it to OK that I'm the website owner. Any idea as what to do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OhYeahSteve0