Do WordPress Blog Comments Help SEO Ranking?

Today I tackle the delicate topic “Can WordPress Blog Comments Help In Ranking Your Content Higher in google search results?”

Obviously, its every website owner’s desire to have their website rank as high as possible in google search results. You are, without any doubt, reading this article because you are looking for ways to improve your website rank.

In pursuit of more website traffic, website owners often ask themselves questions whose answers they seek on the internet. One of those questions is, “How long should my article be to rank high on search engine results page?”

When trying to understand that, a few other questions will arise such as, “Are comments counted when calculating the length of an article?” and then our topic of discussion, “Do WordPress Blog Comments Help SEO Ranking?”

If you want an outright answer if WordPress Comments count in article length and In Ranking Content Higher, I will say YES with a caveat on the ranking. “But not all comments will help you rank higher in google search results.”

In this article, I will help you learn how WordPress Blog Comments can Improve SEO Ranking. By the end of this post, you will be able to use comments to rank on Google result pages.

Before we get in more serious matters let me start by helping those who do not, know what SEO means.

The Concept of SEO

SEO or Search engine optimization in full, is the use and application of skills, methods, strategies, techniques and tactics to increase the organic number of website visitors (traffic) by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine (SERP).

If you do not fully understand the concept of SEO and how to use it to improve your Google ranking, you may read my earlier detailed article on: Search Engine Optimization – SEO Beginner’s Guide.

WordPress Blog Comments and SEO

First and foremost, you must be aware that the length of a post plays a major role in its search engine ranking. This is so because naturally as you write longer and meaningful content, you generate more and more keywords which makes the post more relevant.

According to Yoast, “A blog post should contain at least 300 words in order to rank well in the search engines. Long posts will rank more easily than short posts.”

Now I am not saying that you just write on and on all in the name of having more and more numbers. Numbers are good but you must get them writing meaningful and useful content for visitors.

Google and search engines will reward you for writing quality content that is useful to users. Any attempt to beat the system by use of bogus text will only frustrate your SEO efforts.

You also need to remember that word count for SEO involves all the words on a given page. This means that comments on a WordPress website or blog will be counted.

Since comments are counted in word count, you may not need to labour to write on and on if you can attract meaningful comments that relate to your keywords.

Now there comment spammers who leave bogus comments that have no relationship to the topic of discussion. Many times, these are simply looking for a way to have a link to their website disguised in a comment. If you let many of such comments get published on your page, they will dilute the quality of words on your page and hurt your optimization efforts.

Be smart in your SEO works. Carefully read and vert your comments so that only meaningful high-quality comments are published on your website to preserve the quality of content on your page.

Does the Number of Comments Improve SEO?

The answer is “it depends.” Search engines are looking for quality, relevance and how much your content solves the problems of the searcher. This is NOT a game of only numbers. Its a game of quality.

If you had just a few meaningful but lengthy comments on your blog post, they potentially would have a great variation of your keywords and would most probably improve your SEO more than thousands of short irrelevant comments.

In fact, the more you attract comments that do not relate or contribute to the enhancement of the topic under discussion, the more likely your post will lose its SEO juice.

The other danger in accepting a large number of comments without vetting them is that you will end up linking to very many low quality and often spamming websites. These hurt your reputation and SEO rank.

CommentLuv plugin and SEO

CommentLuv plugin is a comment network that aims at increasing the number of comments to your blog posts.

The plugin entices more people to comment on your posts by visiting the website of the person commenting while they type their comment and retrieve their last blog posts which they can choose to include at the bottom of their comment when they click submit.

Because of this “incentive”, you will get more and more website and blog owners willing to leave a comment on your posts.

Now cool as that might sound, that is a very bad idea for your SEO work. In effect, by enticing commenters with a link, CommentLuv plugin will end up sending you tons of comments from people who have not even read your post and therefore sending comments that do not add any quality to your post.

The other danger of using CommentLuv plugin is that many of the spam commenter’s websites finally get blacklisted for spamming and you have links to them which hurt your website reputation.

When the domains are blacklisted, many times the owners will not renew them when they expire and you will now have dead links on your website originating from comments. All these frustrate your SEO rank.