Most blogs have the option of including a comments section to their blog posts. Blog commenting gives viewers the option to express approval, discontent, or add additional information to the post that might have been missing from the viewer’s point of view. Blog commenting in SEO does make you wonder what works and what doesn’t. However, does anyone really know whether it’s a good or bad idea to have a comments section to your blog?
Adding a comments section to your blog can be purely from a person’s opinion or point of view. It can also be based on factors such as the brand of the business, the type of content it displays, the length of a post, adding backlinks, or having the benefits of SEO comments on blogs. Everyone has a different perspective on why they do or don’t add a comments section to promote their blog.
Looking at things from an SEO perspective, do blog comments help or hurt SEO? This answer can be varied and based off of your experience with blog commenting. However, depending on your business, certain pros and cons may result when it comes to your SEO strategy. In this article we will talk about how blog comments help SEO, how to do blog commenting in SEO, and whether it’s beneficial for your blog to have a comments section or not.
Do Blog Comments Help SEO?
LSI Keywords
A blog commenting strategy can take its part in contributing to an SEO campaign. When someone comments on your blog, one contribution they could give is adding a latent semantic indexing (LSI) keyword. Latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords are keywords that act as synonyms to the main keywords your blog post is targeting. The more similar keywords you utilize within a blog post, the more likely your post will appear higher in search engine result rankings. For example, if your blog post is about “Why SEO is Important,” someone in the comments might add, “I agree, SEO is amazing!”. With this blog commenting strategy, your post might rank higher for a keyword you might have otherwise missed the first time in your blog post.
Long Form Content
Past blog commenting research, pertaining to search engines considering comments as a part of the word count, claims the two of them to be similar in the total number of words within an article or post. For example, you can have a blog post around 1,200 words and your comments section has 600 words. Search engines such as Google could judge your post as having 1,800 words total. Some can consider this research to make sense, while others might not experience seeing this to be true. For any and all purposes, your main goal should be focusing on producing long form content and enhancing the user experience for the reader. This is if it’s appropriate to do so while not being redundant. Setting up for your content to be full of information without having to rely on additional information from your comments section is a great SEO strategy to build off of.
Increased Traffic and Brand Awareness
A blog commenting strategy can help utilize keywords to potentially rank higher through search engines. However, blog comments aren’t always an indicator of blog traffic. One blog post may have tons of comments with little traffic. Whereas, another blog post may have tons of traffic with little comments. It can differ all of the time. Blog commenting opportunities also help raise brand awareness to generate more traffic to the website (as long as you’re strategic with the sites you’re leaving comments on).
Some blog posts can receive a slight boost in traffic due to a comments section. However, the main factor here are keywords that most likely have a huge amount of high-quality keyword-rich content. Your blog can’t always depend on this for every blog post. While this is a rare case by case situation, you shouldn’t have to depend on a number of blog comments to have the biggest impact on your traffic.
3 Tips for Creating a Quality Blog Commenting Strategy
Having a blog comments section can be nice, but is not always a necessity to have on your blog. If your blog doesn’t have a comments section, there’s no need to rush about adding one to your blog. It’s completely up to your personal preference. Your comments section could be causing you loss of money, time, stress, or your readers might not find value from it. In this case, it might be a better move to not include one to your site or blog posts. However, comments can be used to answer questions, further relationships with your readers, and give feedback.
In order for your blog commenting strategy to be successful, it’s important to look at your comments as if they’re content that you produced on your site. Whether you’re leaving comments on another blog, or looking at the comments people left for you, here are a few tips to follow:
- Be genuine and intentional with your comment.
- Don’t spam by commenting on blogs for backlinks. If you choose to leave a comment, follow the first best practice listed above and aim to add value and expertise.
- When it comes to a certain niche in blog commenting, there is no individual best technique method. If there was, everyone would utilize this method and it would lose its value.
Commenting on Blogs for Backlinks
One way to improve your blog commenting strategy could mean cutting out the spam comments and deleting any broken links. Comments on your blog with a backlink used to hold more weight and value, but that’s no longer a recommended best practice for link building. Due to it’s bad link building tactic and abuse, experts state that it no longer holds weight with link juice value.
While blog commenting isn’t a recommended use for link building, it could still be a worthwhile effort to test the effects of it. Some blogs are nofollow with their backlinks, but some are dofollow. Regardless, the overall goal is to not be spammy and to leave comments with intent. Genuine comments contribute value to articles and existing conversations. The best case scenario could lead to increased traffic to your website. It could also lead to increased awareness of your business, website, and content.
Removing Blog Comments
In recent news, during English Google SEO office-hours on February 5, 2021, John Mueller answered several questions including a question about removing comments from a blog post. The question was based on whether or not it would impact SEO rankings on Google. Mueller said Google treats blog comments as part of the main content. If you were to remove them, it may result in hurting your search rankings on Google. Google is able to distinguish the comments part from the blog content part. However, as a search result it treats the piece as a whole.
The biggest points to take away from his answer are:
- Be mindful of Google considering comments as a part of the main blog content.
- If a comment contains information a searcher is looking for, then Google may serve this searcher to land on the page that includes this information within the comments.
- Google is able to distinguish the comments section from the main blog content. Thus, comments will be treated differently.
For blog commenting in SEO, and for ranking purposes, it’s better to keep comments on your blog even if you’re wanting them removed. If someone found your page based on a comment and you delete it, they can’t find it the way they originally found it the first time.
When it comes to negative comments, as much as you’d like to delete them it’s better to keep them. Deleting a negative comment comes off as neglectful and disregarding what your viewers have to say even when it’s true. Your business would have the opportunity to respond back and provide good customer experience to make improvements to your products or services as a whole. The comments you should consider deleting are spammy links to provide your viewers with the best user experience.
Conclusion
Adding a blog comments section can be a great way to add new opportunities to your blog. It can also test out what works and what doesn’t for your website. Even if you decide not to add one, the opportunity will still be waiting there for you to do so. A blog commenting strategy is not the only tactic worth trying to help improve your SEO. If you’re ready to take your small business to the next level, learn more about Boostability’s SEO services and how we can help!
