The other day I had a small conversation with a fellow twitterer , he asked whether comments carry any weight in SEO terms. This question wasn’t a new one for me, I have been thinking of this ever since I started with blogging and optimisation.
The question ignited a debate in my mind and it’s time when I should let John and David take over the discussions. Over to them.
Situation: John is playing with google analytics reports while David is doing some routine backups.
John: amazing….!!
David: what?
John: I think more comments on a blog post means high rankings for that post
David: yes, more content is always good for rankings
John: no, I think comments carry some extra weight more than just being extra content
David: but how is it possible
John: why not
David: I mean, how would google know what is comment what is not
John: that I don’t know, I am seeing high rankings on highly commented posts
David: hmm, but there are so many CMSs and with thousands of templates, parsing comments is close to impossible
John: well.. you are right but…
David: I must say that an ideal search engine should well in fact give extra weight to comments
I myself have seen high rankings on highly commented posts but those could just be coincidences and the presence of extra content due to comments is also a factor.
Why not test it?
One can suggest that this should be tested by making two posts with same content - one with comments and one without, and then by tracking the relative rankings. No, it’s not that easy because even if comments carry extra weight, the weight would be marginal and in the above test other SEO factors might very well outplay the comments factor.
Do you think comments are given any weight by Search Engines?
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I feel Comments have little advantages in terms of keeping content alive, regularly updated content. Apart from this i don’t see any advantages if comments are not highlighting post related keywords.
Congrats Sahil for getting PageRank 2 for your Technodiary.com
@BlogsDNA,
My question was “Do comments have any advantage being comments?” I am not talking about their content or keyword value.
And yes, thanks. I was expecting PR3 though :)
~Sahil
I think, Search engines give weightage for comments only if they have keyword rich content. Just because of more number of comments I don’t think a blog can get a higher PR.
@Pras, :-P we are not talking about PR here.
I dont think so. Long ago i wrote a post on Fifa Vs Pro Evolution Soccer . At that time it received 2-3 comments but still got good rankings in search engine. And after that its comments also increased. So i feel, if your post has got a good ranking, there are chances it will get a lot of comments too.
@Madhur, the post never says that rankings can’t be attained without having comments. SethGodin’s blog is a very good example which states the above point.
How does Google know they are comments?
Google knows everything. Google knows your site is a blog, it is in blog search. If they can tell you are using a blog platform they can tell you are using Wordpress. If they know it is WP then they can tell what is a comment and what is not.
The code footprint would be easy to denote. Make sense?
Blog comments are indexed separately but on the same post, try setting Google alerts for your name and comment on posts that use do follow and you will see
@Chris,
I agree with you on most of the parts, my only concern is about cost. Parsing comments out of lakhs of differently coded templates seems costly to me. And what if I don’t use the words “comment” or “comments” in div ids or classes, won’t I get advantage of the comments I get.
However, one can argue that in 99% of the blogs these words are still used by the coders in right semantics, and the rest 1% could be ignored for this particular SEO factor.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment Chris, this might increase rankings of this post. :)
~Sahil
@Keith,
You mean google alerts on BlogSearch? This is something I need to check.
Maybe the entries with a lot of comments get ranked better because they’re obviously more of interest and therefor get more link love?
Google considers comments as noise, or as very low value text. Otherwise, due to on-page SEO factors any post with a lot of comments would never show up in the SERPs.
@X111, Highly commented post not necessarily get extra links, good possibilty though.
@John, Sorry but I really didn’t get your point.
As far as I know, comments do add to the rankings. I don’t know as to how much.
Google can identify where for instance a wordpress comment list starts easily … as the CSS tags are very clearly identifiable in the code.
So, IMO comments do count, as they are content and some comments are highly relevant to the informational needs of the reader…. They may have certain criteria though as to how much weight they carry … Only google knows …
Lex
Also the a tag attributes ususally use rel=”external” or nofollow or a combination of both in comments.
Hey Sahil, just found your blog through Twitter. Very nice conversation here and I was just thinking about this yesterday. I was looking at PR for my most popular posts in my site and they all had atleast PR 2 and some PR 3 and even a PR4! Coincidentally, these posts are the ones that have the highest number of comments as well. I think Google bot would have the smarts to recognize it and index it.
Nice topic. Stumbled. :-)
Kind of off topic here, but since we are talking commenst here have you all seen what Google is doing with Google Reader?
Google Reader is now a full blown social bookmarking engine.
You can now share, comment, build a friends list and be recommended to other Google Reader users as a blog of quality all within Google Reader.
All these actions create backlinks to your site with the keywords you used in the blog post title. Real powerful stuff.
The full article and screen shots are here:
http://www.keywebdata.com/?p=136
Now this is certainly where Google will see comments as valuable.
Fully followed and SEO friendly.