As a blogger, many of us were not sure how the comments down the blog posts are affecting the website SEO. Most bloggers keep their blog comment options open without checking the quality of the user-generated content and links.
How is User Generated Content Going to Affect Website SEO
Google ranks web pages based on content quality and relevancy among other SEO ranking factors.
How about user-generated content? Is it going to help SEO or not? User-generated content is of different types such as blog comments, a discussion between users or contents which are fully generated by users. The fact is that Google does not differentiate between the content written by webmasters and the users.
Google advises making sure that user-generated contents meet websites’ own publishing standards. It implies that we need to watch out the contents including blog comments as it affects SEO.
If the user-generated contents do not meet the standards, Google recommends to block the page with the following code:
Also, Google adds, website owners, can mark any user-generated links and tell Google that those links are user-generated by adding the attribute rel=”ugc”
In the episode of Ask Google Webmasters with @johnmu, watch out the reply on a question about user-generated content, how it applies to Search, and get some helpful SEO tips to manage it on your site.
