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
-
Need help on declining page rank
Hi Guys,
On-Page Optimization | | Slideuplift123
We had a consistent page ranking for a specific keyword between 5 and 8 positions on google. This week all of a sudden the page which was ranking for that keyword no longer ranks for it and another page has started ranking for that keyword that too at 20th position. I am so confused why has this happened? I didn't do any changes to that page or to the now ranking page. Can anyone help why could this be happening?0 -
Google rankings
I have encountered a serious problem with google rankings and the sequence of events goes like this for a high volume phrase. I make changes to the page which gets a score of 98 in Moz and equally good scores in other tools. I resubmit the page to Google for searching via crawl in google webmasters. After about 1/2 to 1 day, the page will be ranked between 30 and 50. Within another 1/2 to 1 day, the ranking goes completely away. This page has much higher scores than pages that are ranked. Other phrases continue to rank OK.
On-Page Optimization | | tiedyedshop0 -
Adding Location to Title Tags has dropped SEO Rankings
After adding the suburb of my business to each title tag on my website, I've noticed their rankings have dropped from page one to page four in a lot of cases. Should I wait it out and expect to see them improve in the future? Should I revert them back to their old title tags? I'm a little concerned!
On-Page Optimization | | thomaslutrov0 -
How we can rank two keywords
Here is my example. I developed a property inspection app, where the keyword I try to rank is property inspection app, and property inspection software. Property Inspection Software got slightly more traffic than app. I would like to rank both of this keyword high for my main website, but there is only one title, one H1 tag I can use to have keyword, where if I use "App" there is no way to have "Software" on the title, etc. How can I deal with such a case? Any help will be appreciate.
On-Page Optimization | | terrysun0 -
Homepage ranking above category page, but no keywords in there! Why?
So...we have a 5 year diary product page at TOAD diaries. It's had a lot of on page treatment: keyword in title, alt text, decent copy, pictures of the product etc. Find it here - http://www.toaddiaries.co.uk/shop/5-year-diary So we rank 22nd for 5 year diary, but google sends the customer to the home page! There no mention of 5 year diaries on there. Seems ridiculous! I can't help but think we should rank better for this as it's a low difficulty term (according to keyword difficulty tool on MOZ). Any thoughts on why this might be? Oh, Google HAS indexed the 5 year diary page. Used a search operator to check that first (thanks to you guys on here:) ) Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | isaac6630 -
Site Not Ranking for Key Term
Question for my fellow Mozers I have a ranking question that I cannot put my finger on. I have a site (visitplano.com) where the client wants to rank for the keyword "Plano". I can't say if the site was previously ranking for this keyword, but I looked into the basic SEO practices and found that the keyword is incorporated in: Domain Title Content There is a lack of internal linking and anchor text within the content External links - 1,558 DA - 46 PA - 55 Currently, the website does not rank for the keyword "Plano". Could someone shed some light on why they aren't ranking or what I may be missing? I would greatly appreciate your help.
On-Page Optimization | | flcity150 -
Site structure for services and blog articles
Hi, looking for some advice on the structure for a relatively small site (around 200 pages). I'd like a structure where we can talk about our services as well as write blog articles on topics that relate to our services. We'll have loads more content in the blog area than in the services area. I was thinking of this: option 1: /services /services/copywriting
On-Page Optimization | | JaspalX
/services/social-media
/services/press-releases etc. and categories for articles where we'd give tips, talk about trends etc. /copywriting
/social-media
/effective-press-releases
etc. would it be better to have a different structure, say: option 2: /copywriting
/copywriting/services
/copywriting/articles OR option 3: /copywriting-services
/copywriting-blog OR option 4: /services/copywriting
/blog/copywriting OR is there another, better way perhaps? Of course the internal anchor text links to the services/blog articles pages will be tuned to try and make it clear what each section is about i.e. our services vs. industry trends/comments/tips for the blog.0 -
Best SEO structure for blog
What is the best SEO page/link structure for a blog with, say 100 posts that grows at a rate of 4 per month? Each post is 500+ words with charts/graphics; they're not simple one paragraph postings. Rather than use a CMS I have a hand crafted HTML/CSS blog (for tighter integration with the parent site, some dynamic data effects, and in general to have total control). I have a sidebar with headlines from all prior posts, and my blog home page is a 1 line summary of each article. I feel that after 100 articles the sidebar and home page have too many links on them. What is the optimal way to split them up? They are all covering the same niche topic that my site is about. I thought of making the side bar and home page only have the most recent 25 postings, and then create an archive directory for older posts. But categorizing by time doesn't really help someone looking for a specific topic. I could tag each entry with 2-3 keywords and then make the sidebar a sorted list of tags. Clicking on a tag would then show an intermediate index of all articles that have that tag, and then you could click on an article title to read the whole article. Or is there some other strategy that is optimal for SEO and the indexing robots? Is it bad to have a blog that is too heirarchical (where articles are 3 levels down from the root domain) or too flat (if there are 100s of entries)? Thanks for any thoughts or pointers.
On-Page Optimization | | scanlin0