Tuesday 11 February 2014

Are comments now part of Google search results and core to SEO?

In Blog Commenting – A Practical Guide for Bloggers an interesting point was raised. I can't say that it's really new. People have been saying how useful commenting is for years but I haven't seen anyone make the point that comments are now search results.

I'll look more closely into this now that this point has been made. The idea is interesting because I'm thinking why wouldn't Google include them. Googles main focus is on truth and fact and their search business is about gving the customer precisely what they want. The rise of social has thus provided a new type of fact, the comment.

When I search for solutions to problems, which I'm doing right now with a unix issue, the answers I want are in the comments, not the main post or discussion start. So the theory makes sense to me. I'll now watch for the practice. 

Thanks to Karen Jain for this insight. I visited his google+ stream after he left a comment to learn more. His comment led me to the article. Kind of proving the point.

I believe the route google has taken is circuitous. For years they've been investigating ways to curate and organise social data and activity. Google+ is core to this but they've been trying long before.

Fascinating to see that comments may now be a key part of their strategy.

No comments: