PAGE 1 - Why comments are important for rankings
PAGE 2 - How to properly leave comments on a website
PAGE 3 - How NOT to leave comments on a website
PAGE 4 - What I do when getting low quality comments
All of us here at Wealthy Affiliate (WA) have a unique opportunity to boost the rankings of our website by getting “engaging comments” on our content. Notice I put “engaging comments” within quotes, because these are the types of comments we should be giving and getting.
NOTE: The instructions given in this tutorial is mainly for those who use the give and take comment threads. Many of the techniques I dscribe can also be applied if you should use Site Comments and not the give and take thread.
WHY COMMENTS BOOST RANKINGS
Google sees comment interaction as a small ranking factor. It shows Google that our content is of interest to others and that people are interacting with it. When people are interested enough to leave a comment, Google feels that perhaps they will boost your rankings a tiny bit.
The more website visitor interaction our content gets, the better, but the comment should be relevant to the topic you are commenting on. More about this on the next page. Another way comments boost rankings is to provide more content for Google to index.
Google does index all of your comments and replies to those comments. This will also increase your word-count. If your original post was 1,500 words long and you have a bunch of comment interactions totalling 1,000 more words, technically that post is now 2,500 words long.
NEXT UP = How to properly leave comments on a website
Peace💗
For comments versus feedback, I think many people could use feedback before comments -- real feedback that gives them specific areas (even grammar, typos, non-functioning links, etc) that should be fixed right away, before seeking comments on a post.
A year ago or so when I joined WA, there was a process for requesting and giving feedback; I took a lot of time and effort in giving specific feedback to help improve posts/websites of WA members who had requested feedback.
Then, WA seems to have switched to a system of requesting and receiving comments .... instead of feedback. Do you know whether WA still offers a feedback request mechanism (instead of comments directly to a webpage/post)?
Sometimes I'll click on a comment request link, see a lot of typos, grammatical errors (the kind that make a reader click away pretty quickly), format issues, broken links, and I'd like to help that WA member improve their website/post, but I won't add that kind of feedback as a comment (of course, no one would want feedback like that in the comments for everyone to read).
So in that case, I won't leave a comment, and also don't offer feedback since, as far as I'm aware, there no longer seems to be a WA mechanism for getting points/credit of some kind for taking the time and effort to offer these kinds of corrections/feedback for improvement etc. It is a lot of work and takes time and effort to offer real feedback like this, but it's probably more important in many cases than comments, as the feedback can lead to immediate and direct improvements that may keep real visitors/readers on the page/website longer.
Thanks again for your post, always look forward to reading your tips, suggestions and points of view.
Kate
I got started back in Site Comments on 27 April and out of 36, I have had 2 disapproved simply because of the reasons you cited above. Low quality, gave feedback instead of a comment, or totally off point.
This tutorial is really going to help me henceforward to give better quality than what I have been.
Thanks for the tutorial Boomer.
Sonny
Great tutorial once again... Thank YOU.
When getting lame comments on my local business website (Ontario, Canada) from those in India, I simply tag them as spam and then delete them... adding the IP address to to Blacklist so that those using that IP address can no longer make comments.
So, the problem of lame comments is more than those of us who are new to WA, I'm sure.
Thanks to your great tutorial, more of us will now know better... that leaving quality comments really will pay off in the long run. :-))