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
-
Malware, Google Ranking and cleanup
Hi My website was infected with the malware. We have cleaned it and during the process we had to delete the cache. Now website is showing like this on the google. How can i fix this? 3e8e9111-eac7-4238-a691-9678542eb4cf-image.png Secondly, As i have lost all the ranking, how can i get back quickly? Please help Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | fslpso0 -
Multiple H1 tags on Squarespace blog page?
Hi All, I use Squarespace and while running my site (https://www.growmassagebusiness.com) through programs am seeing that my blog posts are being seen as one page with multiple H1 tags. I read through the SS help desk and found back in 2015 someone wrote that it's not a bit deal b/c of HTML5 and that the search engines will read each blog post as a sub-page. I'm not so sure about that and wondering what the experts think? If that is screwy then I'm considering possibly making each blog post it's own page rather than using their blog posting format.
On-Page Optimization | | rajam0 -
Changing commenting platforms...will deleting old comments hurt SEO?
Hi everyone, We've decided to move away from Disqus and use Facebook comments on one of our blogs. Our users prefer it, and we saw traffic increase when we did it on another site. My question is, will removing old comments (we have hundreds of them per post) hurt my seo? I've scoured the internet for an answer but can't find anything up to date. Old best practices said to keep old comments. What do you think? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | TMI.com0 -
Ranking over someone else who has your branded domain name
Hello! I have a client who has been in business for a long time, but was very late to the game online. As a result, the branded domain for his business (for explanation purposes I'll call it "Houston Tan"*) was already taken when he decided he needed a website, however it was not being used. He approached the company that owned "houstontan.com" and they refused to sell it to him. Not only that, they turned around and opened a company and developed the website using his trademarked company name as one word instead of two, "HoustonTan." It was brought to court and the judge determined that since they created a new name by combining the two words, there was nothing that he could do. Still having to create a website for his company, he chose the domain "HoustonSunTan.com." Not sure who was advising him on that one. So now he has a domain name with only a partial match to his company name. As you would imagine, when you search Houston Tan, HoustonTan.com is number 1, 2 & 3, and HoustonSunTan.com is #4. My question is, do you think it is even possible for his company to overtake the top spot of Google? Or have you ever come across a situation like this and if so what worked for you? FYI: Even though it says Houston, the company is a global company in over 500 cities (with one 800 number unfortunately), so local SEO strategies wouldn't necessarily apply. *Names are made up to protect both parties 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | American.Made0 -
Meta description template - will i penalised? Similar but not the same.
UPDATE to original question: Ok can I also add, as a solution, could I use %%title%% | A Commercial Property Website that deals exclusively with Industrial Property, Land and Investments For Sale or Let across Scotland. In Yoast as a meta description - so the descriptions will have individual titles but the rest the same? Or will I be penalised? This is for the 1000 or so listings, but I'll write completely unique descriptions for the pages? We have taken on the marketing and SEO of a site that we didn't build. After the first crawl report there were 103 errors, 760 warnings and 990 notices. Including a lot of 301s - which I'm confused as is a brand new site. http://www.shedfinders.com/ I've made some changes in the editor to ensure unique page titles so errors should come down. However i wanted to ask advice how best to optimise a site like this ... people come on they list an industrial property and then those in the market to let or sell can browse and then get more details on industrial property they like the look of. So there are lots of listings going on that aren't correctly optimised ... should these manually all have meta descriptions and rewrite headers etc? Ideally the listings would rank themselves in Google - but I'm going to no index some of the other less relevant pages. Keen to hear your feedback. Thanks, Laura
On-Page Optimization | | lauratagdigital0 -
Regarding Ranking.
Hi, Could anyone please advise me on how long would he take to get my website ranked in the top 3 results on first page on google. It's an university's website and close to no university's in Malaysia are doing SEO
On-Page Optimization | | navinan0 -
Are blog pages hurting rankings?
Let me begin by saying that I have a Wordpress site with a customized theme. When I view my webpage's crawl diagnostics, it keeps showing a lot of Warnings. There are 89 pages with Too Many On-Page Links and 90 Pages with a missing meta-description tag. The problem is that the pages are listed as follows for both errors: Blog Page 10 Blog Page 11 Blog Page 12 Etc. There are no other pages, just the blog pages (which include about 7 posts/page). How do I eliminate the too many links without deleting them from individual blog posts, and how do I add meta-description tags to blog pages without duplicating the tag for /blog? Thanks! | | | | |
On-Page Optimization | | DuBois
| | |
|
|
| | | |
|
| | | | |
| |0 -
Homepage ranking before optimized page
We finally managed to obtain a spot in the first 10 positions of the serps for our main keyword. Since a week, our homepage started ranking in the top 15 as well, so we we're pretty excited about that. On our way to dominate the top 10! Since 2 days we started to rank with our homepage before our optimized page, which sucks because the metadescription (made up by Google) isn't helping our CTR. Is there a way that we can show Google that the other page is more relevant than the homepage? Or do we have to wait until we have build up enough PA to switch places with the homepage (seems unlikely to me).
On-Page Optimization | | duoweb0