User comments are now a tool to increase your website’s Google Ranking. Google has recently increased the importance it places on user comments visible – present – on a page. What are positive comments and how can these be used to lead you to higher Google Rankings?
What is a positive comment? It is a comment expressing appreciation, usually because a user has found the content on your site/webpage(s) useful. Google’s tracking allows us to see that there is a link between higher Google rankings and the presence of positive comments within your site. Good comments are utterances that initiate engagement and add to your content’s usefulness and informative-ness.
If Google can track the comments left by users on sites, how does one increase positive comments within the site? In his 1993 “Content is King” essay, Microsoft Founder Bill Gates said; “Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting.” Creating useful, fresh and user-centric content is a sure-fire formula to increase the number of positive comments on your site. People only share content they deem useful and informative, there is no short cut to this; content is king. Ideally, you want users of your site to read and share your content because sharing your content via social media will also increase your visibility.
As much as user comments are useful, it is important to make sure that spam comments are removed as these can potentially work to your disadvantage because they can hinder your site from appearing in search engines, like Google.
Google can easily estimate which content is shared and liked by the user, by analysing the quality of the comments. These comments are used to identify whether or not web pages are relevant, and whether or not they are of any value.
The number of comments on your site is a good indication that your page must have received a high number of social shares. A high number of shares indicates the usefulness of your web pages and eventually increases the overall semantic value of your sites to help them rank higher.
If any content available on the web has a high number of positive comments, then the chances are high that the page must have received a high number of social shares, thereby increasing its overall semantic value to help it rank higher.