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How blog comments influence search engine rankings
The phrase shown in the following image was not from my hand but from a conversation that went on in the comments field of my an old deleted post from this blog. The words had a negative influence on my search engine rankings. It appeared in my stats today showing that someone had searched Google for it. Notice how it is in quotes which is either the behavior of someone at Google or an SEO (was that you SFL?).
Ever wonder why competitive SEOs like Bruce Clay and other Savvy marketers don’t have a comment area in their blogs?
Comment text can increase your rankings with a whole encyclopedia of relevant words and phrases but you have no control over the conversation. This is not to say that Bruce Clay is a control freak but it does show that he is all about business. On the other hand this blog is (and always will be) about fun, learning and lunacy so I have no control over the conversation.
The SEOMoz blog is a different story, it is the place where SEOs make comments to impress new clients and other SEOs (much like they do in SEO Forums). That highly targeted conversation increases the rankings in search engines for SEOMoz so it would be foolish to turn comments off there. SEOMoz is all about shared conversation to obtain high rankings and yes — business just like Bruce Clay.
Anyhow, the phrase in the image above was from a long conversation that people had in the early days of this blog when it had less text and Google and other search engines had yet to make sense out of it. That 25 peeps post (a linkbait, now deleted) along with a few others that turned a bit p-o-r-n-o-g-r-a-p-h-i-c built a negative (or positive depending on what you are into) site flavor. This explains why I ranked for all kinds of junk that people from darker areas of the net would have paid for.
So in my study of social media (before it became known as “SMO”) I had already made good sense of this all. The value of the conversation is exactly what the sum all the text (including the comments) is believed to be. In other words, your blog is an encyclopedia of words and phrases. If you do not want to be associated with comments you have no control over, turn your comments off or stand and be counted, judged and ranked in search engines accordingly.
If you are being found in search engines for all kinds of trashy stuff and you have not been fooling around in your blog, you might also have been hacked, so before you go yell at Matt, take a good look at your blog, stats, comment history and in Google Webmaster Tools to verify.
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December 7th, 2006 at 8:21 am
LMAO!
I swear, it wasn’t me. I don’t look for p-o-r-n on Google anymore…I mean…ever…I mean…I don’t have any at all on my hard drive. :)
(Seriously, I graduated to downloading p-o-r-n soundtracks from Shareaza and pissing the GF off with them. You can get all the crappy music from the 70s that way. Bow wow chicka chicka!)
December 7th, 2006 at 10:34 am
;o)
February 21st, 2007 at 6:25 pm
Haha, I bet you’re proud to rank for such high-quality phrases. ;)