Lost all comments on our blog...will it hurt rankings?
-
We recently installed Facebook comments into our blog and now we lost all of our old comments. Does this have any affect on SEO? Will this hurt our rankings?
Thanks!
-
Thank you, Jane. It appears we are able to restore our comments, but it's good to know that it's not a negative factor.
-
Hi there,
I would say that comments, especially of a good length and with no duplication from elsewhere (so not just people stopping by to say "great post!") would be seen as a positive signal, but not nearly enough to qualify as a ranking factor. That is, having no comments would count as a lack of a signal, not necessarily a negative factor.
It's unfortunate that the site has lost all of its comments. Anecdotally, the same thing happened to a blog of mine four or five years ago. The site did not suffer a drop in traffic and remains successful.
-
It's possible, but I haven't seen any studies that are conclusive. However, having additional unique content on your site can help with rankings though, especially if it includes long tail variations of keywords that you didn't include in your article, which you can also rank for.
-
Thank you for your responses. In this instance, I don't think we had any "high authority" comments, mostly just reactions from our community. However, what do you all think about the quantity of comments? Does that have an impact? For example, the more comments, the higher you will rank... Any thoughts are appreciated.
-
A few weeks ago I heard some interesting talk about this. I go to a local SEO meetup and Jon Henshaw from Raven Tools attends sometimes. He actually had an interesting thought on comments. Apparently from his own personal tracking having a comment by a top influential commenter can drive a post up in the SERP's. I think he mentioned a post he had that was kind of lackluster, but a notable person commented on it, and it drove it up pretty high.
-
Like Takeshi said, it does affect with long tails, especially if you got a good deal of traffic from that before.
Aside from that, I wouldn't really mind too much. If it's a good site, it'll get some good comments again.
But yeah, disqus is a pretty good alternative but you probably have your reasons for going with Facebook only.
Good luck!
-
It can potentially affect your rankings for some keywords, especially long tail keywords. User comments generally the highest quality content, but they are content nonetheless and indexed by Google.
One solution might be to switch to a comment system such as Disqus. Disqus will still allow users to login with Facebook (as well as Twitter & Google+) and can be configured so that the comments are indexable.
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
-
Page Rank Lost After Website Transfer
Hello, I recently transferred a website from Ruby on Rails to Wordpress in order to help with the site's responsiveness. I kept all of the URLs the exact same, but when I transferred it only the homepage and one other page kept their page ranks, all of the others have lost theirs completely. Almost every page on the site was at least a PR 2, and now their not ranked, and not ranking in the top of search engines like they were before. I am not quite sure what might have caused this, like I said, I kept the URLs all the exact same and its strange that 2 pages were not effected. I crawled the site with Screaming From and all of the pages that lost their page rank have a status as "Moved Permanently". They are the exact same URL, but they are listed without www. in front, could this have something to do with it? The website is www.goenergylink.com, and you will see that the homepage and "Residential" page still have their page rank, but none of the others do. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated! Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | mcmckenna10 -
My Site's Name Not Ranking in Google
Hey all, I've seen a few posts like this. But I wanted to start a new thread in hopes I may find the underlying issue. I've had my site: http://www.ctrl-alt-success.com for about 2 years. Recently I've started really adding a lot of content to it. (about 2-3 posts a week). I get zero organic views which is fine as I know it's still in the beginning. But here's my main question. If I type "ctrl-alt-success" into google. I get some site that shows up. "ctrlaltsuccess.com" I've been looking at this issue forever. That site has been "coming soon" for nearly 2 years. lol My site doesn't even show up on the first 10 pages of google. However in Bing and Yahoo it ranks on the first page. What could my site be doing wrong that it's not even ranking for the exact domain name? Keep in mind, if I google "ctrl-alt-success.com" my site comes up fine. Any help would be appreciated, thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Ctrl-Alt-Success0 -
Ranking Oddities
In my local marketplace, I have competitors who have the following: unoptimized title tags and description tags (really long using keyword stuffing), stuffing keywords into the Meta keywords tag, lacking keywords in the body copy, using spammy footers or sections of text with a lot of local cities listed where no physical business is located, unattractive design (in my humble opinion), lower page authority, lower domain authority, lower number of back links and are organically outranking my site that I have tried to optimize using the MOZ tools, Market Samurai, other tools, and other great advice provided by people much more knowledgeable than myself about SEO. I don't understand how these sites that lack SEO continue to rank in the #1 or #2 spots in Google for my main keyword phrase + location, while my site is either not in the top 50 or in the top 40s range. How is it that sites with little to no optimization, no blogs, and very few backlinks, continue to rank quite well? These are not all new sites. Domain ages range from 1 to 10 years. What I am seeing appears to go against the grain of SEO recommendations. Any general thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | ajgrossman1 -
Home Page Keywords not Ranking and Assigned to Inside Pages
Hi, thank you for taking the time to read this. We have a few websites with the same problem. I will use http://www.prepared-meals.com as an example: The home page was ranking on page one for keyword "Prepared Meals". The site is about 6 months old. We use the Moz page optimizer on all pages of our websites to score an A rating. Recently we found the home page is no longer showing up in search results and the keyword "prepared meals" now points to an inside page that is not relevant: http://www.prepared-meals.com/Senior-Meals/Moms-Meals-Reviews.html this page shows up for Prepared Meals around page 15 in Google results. We have read keywords in the URL might be the issue, even though the page optimizer in MOZ says to do that. We are wondering if this is the issue or there is some other problem we are not aware of. Again, thank you for you for your time. -Craig
On-Page Optimization | | CraigSWD0 -
Blog URL
I know that this question has been asked in the past, and that website.com/blog is better for seo purposes than blog.website.com. We want to setup a custom blog on our site, using Wordpress. Our designers/host are telling us that buy using website.com/blog can causes issues b/c Wordpress is open source, and our site could be hacked? Is there anything we should do about this? Any suggestions? Any Advice appreciated!!! Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | TP_Marketing0 -
Should I delete my old blog now that it has been transfered?
I just transfered my free wordpress.com blog to my main business site and I did not know if I should delete my old blog or is it a big issue to have the same content on both sites. I will be adding to my biz site from now on.
On-Page Optimization | | greenjoe0 -
Google Ranking Dropped
Hi We launched a new website on the12th Feb 2012, it appeared on google page one for the search term "compare travel insurance" . Last week it changed ranking to page 49 of google ranking. my site is www.1234compare1234travel1234insurance1234ireland1234.com Take out the 1234 for my site address, some people have mentioned that it was honeymooned to page 1 due to being a new site with new content. Can anyone tell me if it looks as if I've done something wrong and been penalised by google? If not are there any SEO advice I could use to improve ranking? All comments and advice appreciated. Regards Paul
On-Page Optimization | | CocoMagenta1 -
Redirect and page ranking
We used to have a good page rank of Google, but now our page rank dropped to zero. A few months ago we did a redirect from our www.???.com to non-www.???.com, because non-www.???.com is now our main website. We also have a number of other domains which we redirect to our main website non-www.???.com Do you think these redirects are causing the problem, and if so what can we do to fix it? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | poupette0