Google: Deleting Blog Comments Might Hurt Search Rankings
During the recent Google Search Central SEO office-hours hangout recorded on 5th February 2021, Google’s John Mueller advised website owners that deleting all comments from their site might negatively affect their search rankings. A website owner submitted a question asking whether Google considers blog comments as a ranking factor or not. They wished to delete comments from their site and wanted to know if they could do that without losing or hurting their site’s rankings. Well, in short, the answer is: Yes, Google considers comments as a ranking factor for web pages, and no, it is improbable that you can delete comments from a website without affecting its search rankings. Let’s discuss these two points in detail now. JOHN MUELLER’S TAKE ON DELETING COMMENTS Google’s John Mueller has not given any recommendations or suggestions regarding whether or not one should delete comments from their website or not. So that’s basically up to the site owners to decide. However, respon...