Can horrific grammar and spelling in comments hurt the value of an otherwise great page?

[bizzer]

I've got a website whose pages get lots of comments.  Tons of activity, which I would think Google would like (and seems to like).  However -- I just can't put this nicely -- most commenters are not very bright.  Their grammar and spelling is horrific. These are not foreigners who lack English skills, they are just about all primarily English speakers and the site is 99% US traffic. It's a low-income segment of the population.

So, I've been wondering recently if Google will mark down the value of the page due to the bad grammar and spelling in the comments, even if the page's content is otherwise very good and lengthy.  I have read that they grammar and spelling into consideration when looking at the page, but would that include comments, or would they know they are comments and not judge a page on that?

It would be a pain, but maybe I should I run all the comments at least through a spell checker? And manually fix their grammar? Problem is I get about 40 comments a day.

And when I say bad grammar and spelling, I mean REALLY bad. Embarrassing.

[Chris.Menke]

I would argue that if this is the type of person who could be your customer you can keep it as is and let google index it.  As you said, it is helping you in the short term.  Upon any manual review, it would seem that it would pass easily, and that it is not any type of auto-generated spam or produced with the intention of manipulating pagerank or search results.

Could it get you filtered in the future? Maybe, but more likely maybe not. Is it helping bring in more of the same kind of people?  I think it is.  But I don't think you have a reason to shy away from such legitimate engagement.

[bizzer]

I just thought I'd show you all what a typical comment looks like.  as bad as this is, it's only about average. They can be much,much worse.   And yes, it came in all caps, as many do.

I JUST  GOTTEN THIS BUGET  PHONE  A COUPLE OF WEEKS  AGO AND I WANT  ,,,, TO USE  IT BUT I CN'T  CONNECT  WHAT SHOULD , I DO I  NEED A PHONE  REEL BAD  CAUSE I'M THU THE GOVERMENT PROGRAM  AND I  DO HAVE  MEDICAL-CAL  AND I  NEED A PHONE  TO CONECT  PEOPLE AND I'M ON A PROGRAM  WITH THE COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES .AND IF I  NEED TO B CONTACT  I CAN'T  SO WHAT I DO  . I  BEEN CALLING THE PHONE  BUT THERE NO ANSWERS I'M VERY CONFUSE...

[bizzer]

Good point.  Some of the comments are unintelligible, so I might want to manually make them sound like at least a third grader wrote them.

The good thing about our not-so-bright readers is that they get confused and click lots of ads.

[JVRudnick]

Flavour - schmavour!

the only thing in my world that hurts conversions - is the inablity to communicate! if the bad grammar does that, then I'd find a way to change it to work for you - rather than against you....

[Ray-pp]

Leave the comments as is and do not worry about spelling. Google understands spelling mistakes and I don't think you'll receive any kind of penalty for it.

In fact, if the people commenting are the type of people you want on the site, then the mispellings will work in your favor. That same demographic is typing those horrific misspelled words in Google search and you have them right on page.

[KevinBudzynski]

If the comments are useful (contextual relevant) and don't look spammy, leave them as is.

Will fixing the misspellings hurt you? Most likely no. A Google patent states:  "content deemed to be unimportant if updated/changed, such as...comments...may be given relatively little weight or even ignored altogether when determining UA"

However, I would probably leave as is.

[Chris.Menke]

I don't think so.  I have a feeling the grammar/spelling adds to the flavor of your search results and that they help to bring in more folks who are likely to engage in similar ways.  However, if the people commenting are not your target audience, that would be a different issue.