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
-
At scale way to check content in google?
Is there any tools people know about where I can verify that Google is seeing all of our content at scale. I know I can take snippets and plug them into Google to see if we are showing up, but this is very time consuming and want to know across a bulk of pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
If a website trades internationally and simply translates its online content from English to French, German, etc how can we ensure no duplicate content penalisations and still maintain SEO performance in each territory?
Most of the international sites are as below: example.com example.de example.fr But some countries are on unique domains such example123.rsa
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dave_Schulhof0 -
All Thin Content removed and duplicate content replaced. But still no success?
Good morning, Over the last three months i have gone about replacing and removing all the duplicate content (1000+ page) from our site top4office.co.uk. Now it been just under 2 months since we made all the changes and we still are not showing any improvements in the SERPS. Can anyone tell me why we aren't making any progress or spot something we are not doing correctly? Another problem is that although we have removed 3000+ pages using the removal tool searching site:top4office.co.uk still shows 2800 pages indexed (before there was 3500). Look forward to your responses!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | apogeecorp0 -
Ajax Content Indexed
I used the following guide to implement the endless scroll https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started crawlers and correctly reads all URLs the command "site:" show me all indexed Url with #!key=value I want it to be indexed only the first URL, for the other Urls I would be scanned but not indexed like if there were the robots meta tag "noindex, follow" how I can do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wwmind1 -
Wordpress Duplicate Content
We have recently moved our company's blog to Wordpress on a subdomain (we utilize the Yoast SEO plugin). We are now experiencing an ever-growing volume of crawl errors (nearly 300 4xx now) for pages that do not exist to begin with. I believe it may have something to do with having the blog on a subdomain and/or our yoast seo plugin's indexation archives (author, category, etc) --- we currently have Subpages of archives and taxonomies, and category archives in use. I'm not as familiar with Wordpress and the Yoast SEO plugin as I am with other CMS' so any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated. I can PM further info if necessary. Thank you for the help in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BethA0 -
Duplicate content for images
On SEOmoz I am getting duplicate errors for my onsite report. Unfortunately it does not specify what that content is... We are getting these errors for our photo gallery and i am assuming that the reason is some of the photos are listed in multiple categories. Can this be the problem? what else can it be? how can we resolve these issues?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Hidden Content with "clip"
Hi We're relaunching a site with a Drupal 7 CMS. Our web agency has hidden content on it and they say it's for Accessibility (I don't see the use myself, though). Since they ask for more cash in order to remove it, the management is unsure. So I wanted to check if anyone knows whether this could hurt us in search engines. There is a field in the HTML where you can skip to the main content: Skip to main content The corresponding CSS comes here: .element-invisible{position:absolute !important;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);clip:rect(1px,1px,1px,1px);} #skip-link a,#skip-link a:visited{position:absolute;display:block;left:0;top:-500px;width:1px;height:1px;overflow:hidden;text-align:center;background-color:#666;color:#fff;} The crucial point is that they're hiding the text "skip to main content", using clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px), which shrinks the text to one pixel. So IMO this is hiding content. How bad is it? PS: Hope the source code is sufficient. Ask me if you need more. Thx!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zeepartner0 -
Duplicate Content on Blog
I have a blog I'm setting up. I would like to have a mini-about block set up on every page that gives very brief information about me and my blog, as well as a few links to the rest of the site and some social sharing options. I worry that this will get flagged as duplicate content because a significant amount of my pages will contain the same information at the top of the page, front and center. Is there anything I can do to address this? Is it as much of a concern as I am making it? Should I work on finding some javascript/ajax method for loading that content into the page dynamically only for normal browser pageviews? Any thoughts or help would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grayloon0