This is John Locke, and today we're answering a question this comes from
Reddit. The question goes, "We have a client site and the site owners
have been using blog comments for a while. They want to keep them for
social proof. What the owners do is they'll go in and ask questions and then
answer them or or go in and add comments. But I want to take comments out because
it will load the page faster, and I think this will be better for SEO." So what are
your thoughts on this? This is a great question. First I want to preface
this by saying I think both you and the site owners are looking at it from the
wrong perspective. Blog comments are useful for SEO, if you are able to get
real engagement. It sounds like some of your posts are not getting real
engagement, and so the business owners are going in and having to seed the
comments with different things. Because you're not actually getting traffic or
engagement on them now. If they could do that -- get real engagement -- that would be useful. The reason
why this is useful for SEO is, if you have posts like this, where people are
asking questions, it means obviously they're finding it
in search already -- and what they're doing is, they're adding more content to the
page. So when they ask questions, and you answer it via comments, that's adding
more content to the page. It's answering further questions, and it's
going to make Google see that page as more valuable. The more questions
that get answered, the more words that are answering things
around that subject, the better it is. Now the owner is going in and having
to add comments to (post). If a post is not getting engagement, I would just disable
comments for that post. If it's a WordPress site, just disable comments for
that one post. Now you didn't really indicate
whether you were using a third party solution like Facebook comments, or
Disqus, or anything like that. So I'm guessing that you're using
the native WordPress comments. If that's the case, you can disable them on a
post by post basis. (You can) close comments for ones that aren't getting any
interaction now. If you do have posts that are getting interaction, that's a
very great thing to have. So your question is, as an SEO consultant, you
want to speed up the page, because you think that that's going to be better for
SEO. That's definitely something that you could do. But I would not remove the
comments altogether. I would go through this site, and look at what comments are
real, which ones are fake. Take out the fake ones, leave what's real. Maybe
disable comments or close comments for posts that aren't getting
any interaction. And if you want to speed up the site, what you can use is a plugin
that I use on my site -- it's called Lazy Load for Comments. Yeah, Lazy Load for
Comments. It's a free plug-in in the repo, in the WordPress plug-in repo. And what
happens is, either you scroll down to a certain spot, and it will load the comments,
or if you click a button that says "Load More Comments", it'll load more comments.
So if you're a developer, set that up configure it make it work for your needs.
If your site is lagging, and has that many speed problems, I think the comments
is only one little thing. Generally speaking, that shouldn't be a that big of
an issue. I would look at upgrading your hosting, get on a host like Kinsta,
that's based off Google Cloud and that has up-to-date PHP versions,
blazing fast speed, lots of optimization for speed. That's something that I would look
at doing. If you're on a old hosting platform
that uses cPanel, and maybe the PHP version is still 5.6 that's bad news. That's
that's definitely going to slow your site down. So upgrading the hosting will
help a lot more than disabling comments. I do hope that that answers that
question. mMy name is John Locke. My business is
Lockedown Design and SEO. We help manufacturing and industrial companies
with SEO. If you have a question, leave it in the comments below, we'll answer it.
We're publishing here every week, so we'd love to see you subscribe. Until
next time. peace.