SEO Value for Visitor Comments on WordPress Blog

[maxcarnage]

Hi all,

I was wondering what SEO value, if any, there is from user comments on my WordPress blog. A lot of them seem to be from bots or incredibly generic.

So I guess, aside from possibly adding to the 'trust' factor and the possibility of facilitating a potential relationship with another relevant website, is there any value here?

I can't wait to hear from you all!

[Chris_Hickman]

JP,

The best reason to have comments on a site is to add some additional value and increase in engagement. Other than that, they are not necessary. You want to have comments that are thought out, relevant, and helpful. Avoid the spammy links, which happens quite a bit on a WP site. There are some good plugins that blog spammy links, I would look into those. You can also approve any back links, which I would suggest. This way you don't get the spammy comments. Those comments are not adding any value to your page.

Hope this helps.

Chris

Adficient.com

[TimHolmes]

UGC or User Generated Content can be extremely powerful and add huge weighting to your sites SEO value, but it also has a another effect  that helps with customer credibility.

As users come along and see real comments that are related to the topic, offer advice, show valued reviews etc it will then results in your content becoming potentially becoming an authority on specific subjects. Take these Moz Questions for example - some of the questions can be very small and to the point, but it is often the huge number of user generated responses that propels the questions up the search result page.

So in essence UGC is extremely valuable - just ensure you lock down the bots and spammers and some types of user data (e.g. links, html etc) which can do the reverse and make you less credible as a source.