Does Removing Comments from Blog Posts Affect Your SEO Ranking?

A question that some may ask to Google is your blog comments will affect your SEO ranking? 

According to John Mueller, a Google expert, he advises that removing all the comments from a website may adversely impact your search rankings. 

However, it is still up to the individual company to decide if they want to remove their comments section from their blog.

Site owners should take note that the Google algorithm sees comments as part of your site’s content and if a comment contains the information that someone is searching for, it can then help to get your page get noticed in the search results.

However, Mueller notes that Google is able to distinguish the comment section from the main site content, so comments will be treated differently. 

In some cases, comments can be included as part of the page that can be valuable to pages if they contain additional information that is not in the main content. Though this is not always the case and they may sometimes offer little to no value.

Mueller suggests examining the queries leading to pages on a site to estimate what the impact of deleting all comments might be.

The information that is found in your pages’ comments could be helping searchers with various queries. From there, you can decide what is the best action to take for your website.

This is an excerpt of what John Mueller said in his reply:

“I think it’s ultimately up to you. From our point of view we do see comments as a part of the content. We do also, in many cases, recognise that this is actually the comment section so we need to treat it slightly differently. But ultimately if people are finding your pages based on the comments there then, if you delete those comments, then obviously we wouldn’t be able to find your pages based on that.

So that’s something where, depending on the type of comments that you have there, the amount of comments that you have, it can be the case that they provide significant value to your pages, and they can be a source of additional information about your pages, but it’s not always the case.

So that’s something where I think you need to look at the contents of your pages overall, the queries that are leading to your pages, and think about which of these queries might go away if comments were not on those pages anymore. And based on that you can try to figure out what to do there.”

Monitor your website and see if your comments are affecting your search rankings to decide if you should make adjustments to your site. 

Google does not ignore your comments as they are still a part of your site’s content so if you do delete them, expect to see some changes to your search rankings. 

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