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
-
Horrible ranking for hundreds of content pages
We have hundreds of pages of restaurant reviews (each is 100% original content) on our site (for example, here is a list of many of the content pages: https://www.rewards21.com/articles). The PA of almost every page is 1 (ouch). Doing even the most long-tail Google search doesn't bring up one of those pages (even if I include our company name in the search string). I'm certain we have lots of room to improve SEO, but not even seeing the pages come up for even the most long-tail search has me concerned... Our site used to be on Wordpress many months ago and many of these pages ranked fine..ever since switching away from Wordpress, we've not made any SEO progress. Am wondering if something major is "broken" with our site SEO...
On-Page Optimization | | r210 -
Duplicate meta data - will i be penalised
i have set up a site in wordpress and used a plug in to create a holding page.it has created the same meta data but with the open graph tags - have an og:: prefix. is this ok?
On-Page Optimization | | neilhenderson0 -
Ranking Fluctuations
I need your help. My rankings have been on a wild roller coaster ride since I started optimizing the site with standard on page optimization changes. (No keyword stuffing or over-optimization...) I have only made positive changes for the content on the page; I created unique descriptions for every product. I redirected some urls that weren’t readable into a more user- friendly format. I am only doing completely organic link building, really. Yet for some weird reason the rankings initially rose and then steeply fell and ever since have went back up to the top and right back to not in the top 50 results. Just to give you an example this is a graph of one of our main keywords: https://www.diigo.com/item/image/3vpdp/gd2q This is another keyword that we admittedly never were in the top 5 results but usually we were in the top 20. Check out the wild fluctuations. If it wasn't the main keyword we were going after, I would probably laugh. https://www.diigo.com/item/image/3vpdp/rcy9 I asked an expert he said he think it might be from a major issue with internal competition. The keywords that seem to fluctuate the most, have numerous landing pages that compete for the same keyword. Since we sell the same object in many many different sizes, thicknesses and colors it only makes sense that we have the same keyword on many pages. I would love someone that is an expert in this area to have a look at the site and give actionable advice so I can stop the craziness. Do you have any suggestions? Do you have anyone that you’d refer for this type of job/consulting?
On-Page Optimization | | EcomLkwd0 -
Keyword in URL: Ranking Factor?
I've got a site about a specific topic, which we'll call "themes" for the sake of this discussion. I personally like to keep the url structure short and clean (for usability purposes, but mainly because I'm a perfectionist and a minimalist). I feel that adding "themes" to the url structure is a bit redundant. However, nearly every keyword phrase that my site should rank for includes the word "themes." So I'm wondering how much I'm handicapping myself by not including the keyword "themes" in the url? The domain name itself sort of includes the keyword . . . although it's in Italian (I chose the domain for it's brand-ability, not for the keyword). A quick example: My Url Structure: www.themo.com/topic/abc My Competitor's Url Structure: www.sitesample.com/themes/topic/abc For many of the keywords, the competitors with the keyword in the url rank highest. But, I'm not sure how much emphasis to place on this, because from my understanding Google doesn't pay as much attention to url keywords anymore . . . and those sites might just be ranking high because they've been around for so long (which also happens to be the reason why they coincidentally also include the keyword in the url, because they started the site when that was a high ranking factor). Thoughts? Should I just trash my perfectionism and add the keyword to the url structure? (By the way, the site is only a couple months old and doesn't have any significant backlinks to inner pages yet, so changing the url structure wouldn't be a big deal if I decided to do that).
On-Page Optimization | | JABacchetta0 -
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 -
Will Google handle "this not that" pages differently?
If you create pages about "try keyword1 not keyword2" will there be any barriers to getting the pages ranked for keyword2? Example: You have furnished rental units in a small town, and you offer nightly/weekly rentals. You want to rank for "town hotel" since you offer the same service as a hotel. Since you're not really a hotel, you create a page called "Better than a hotel: Town nightly rental units". Anyone know if Google has an algorithm to detect this (they would have to detect the meaning of the words you were using and know that you were promoting something other than a hotel) and determine you're not really relevant to "town hotel" and not rank you well? I think they probably do not, as I've seen things like Google Adsense Alternatives articles ranking well for the term Google Adsense, or Boycott Godaddy sites ranking well for the term godaddy. But I would like to hear any evidence or facts others know of.
On-Page Optimization | | AdamThompson0 -
How to improve On-Page Grades for Top Ranking Pages
please help me - i dont know or understand how to improve on-Page Grades for Top Ranking Pages
On-Page Optimization | | pwwukpw0 -
Re-optimizing onsite SEO, can it hurt?
We finished the re-design of our website a few months ago. We have hired a few freelance SEO guys that were horrible. We then decided to pull the SEO work in-house. I got nominated to do the SEO work. I started with what I thought was pretty good on-site SEO. At that time, with no experience, I was pretty proud of myself. I managed to get a bunch of our pages at top SERPs for long-tail keywords. Good enough for then. Now when I go look at the pages, I'm embarrassed to admit that it's my work. Please be kind. 🙂 Since then I have been trying to learn as much as possible about SEO. I'm certainly far ahead of where I was a few months ago. For the past few weeks I've been trying to focus my efforts on creating original keyword rich original content. Our competitors all have tried this, but their content is hardly readable by humans. Anyhow, we finished our fist article, it got indexed by G almost immediately and started to push our keyword SERPs up within just a few days. Now for my question. I have a much better understanding of on-page SEO and realize that I could make many improvements to ALL of our other pages. However, these pages are already doing fairly well with the SERPS and are moving up a few ranks a week. I'm very tempted to throw caution to the wind and completely redo all of our on-page SEO for our entire site. Is this a good strategy?
On-Page Optimization | | dmac
Should I expect our SERPs to drop a little, a lot, or not at all? I look forward to your response. DMac0