Influence of users' comments on a page (on-page SEO)

[gt3]

Do you think when Google crawls your page, it "monitors" comments updates to use this as a ranking factor? If Google is looking for social signs, looking for comments updates might be a social sign as well (ok a lot easier to manipulate, but still social).

thx

[Mr.Rangen]

Are you talking about blog comments or comments on social media wall posts/tweets?

If you were referring to, comments within your domain, they can see the last updated info about the page and may come back the new comments.

When new content is added through the comments, then they can determine more/less relevance of the page via KW saturation and outbound link anchor text & destinations. It wouldn't really be a social signal, just one that tells the search engine the page is still be used/spammed. Probably couldn't determine too much from that!

[gt3]

I was talking about blog comments. In a high competitive market it might be interesting for Google to list sites with more traffic (or higher user engagement = # of likes = # of tweets = # of comments updates) on top.

I had this question because I've just added Facebook comments into my page and I'm going to use their graph API to load comments and put it within the page (so Google can crawl Facebook comments).

The only bad thing about comments is that they usually are very shallow in terms of keyword usage.

thx

[Mr.Rangen]

Ahhh, Gotchya! That's not a bad idea. Biggest factor I would see with them doing is how to determine which comments were authentic. Seems like the majority of site owners don't understand how scrapebox (comment kahuna, fast blog finder, DoFellow) works and will approve SOME spam no matter what.

I would definitely be interested in seeing posts with high quality dialogging going on though. Maybe another reason they are pushing the +1 button..

[Gyi]

I think comments are a ranking factor. I think that we will also see who comments (i.e. author rank) become more important than merely having comments too.

[gt3]

Do you think comments are a ranking factor because of the keyword usage or because search engines can check comment count, for instance?

How a search engine can determine who comment if it's a local comment system? What about facebook comments?