Lost all comments on our blog...will it hurt rankings?

[TMI.com]

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!

[TMI.com]

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.

[JaneCopland]

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.

[TakeshiYoung]

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.

[TMI.com]

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.

[LesleyPaone]

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.

[DennisSeymour]

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!

[TakeshiYoung]

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.