Tuesday 11 February 2014

Matt Cutts: Bad Grammar in Comments Isn't a Negative Google Ranking Factor

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Matt Cutts

Creating quality content for websites is always a hot topic. Part of that naturally is ensuring that your content has good readability, is somewhat grammatically correct, and gives users what they are searching for.
But if users contribute comments to your website or WordPress blog, and those comments aren't necessarily grammatically correct or don't have a high readability score, can this hurt your rankings? Matt Cutts from Google has the lowdown in his latest webmaster help video.
"I wouldn't worry about the grammar in your comments. As long as the grammar on your own page is fine ... there are people on the Internet and they write things and it doesn't always make sense," Cutts said. "You can see nonsense comments on YouTube and other large properties and that doesn't mean that YouTube video will be able to rank."
It is worth noting that he states nonsense comments, and not spam comments. All spam comments should be removed from any website for SEO reasons as well as just overall site quality and user experience.
"Just make sure that your own content is high-quality. You might want to make sure that people aren't leaving spam comments, if you've got a bot, then they might leave bad grammar," Cutts said. "But if it's a real person and they are leaving a comment and the grammar is not slightly perfect, that usually reflects more on them than it does on your sites, so I wouldn't stress out about that."
So just ensure your website is producing great quality content and don't worry about whether any comments are grammatically perfect.