Google’s John Mueller gives advice to the website owners that removing all comments from a website may impact search rankings. Mueller was asked a question during the Google Search Central SEO hangout that whether blog comments are factored into Google’s search rankings. Is it possible to remove comments without affecting the rankings?

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Explanation By Google

• Yes, Google factors comment into Google’s search rankings.
• No, it is not possible that comments can be removed from a website without affecting its rankings.

John Mueller Response

Mueller does not recommend any site owner to remove comments or not, it’s up to them to decide. Mueller states that website owners must be aware that Google take comments as a part of the content. If in case a comment has relevant information that a searcher is looking for then it can help rank the page better in the search results. However, Google is able to differentiate the comment section from the main content, so comments up being treated differently.

Statement By John Mueller

I think it’s ultimately up to you. From our point of view we do see comments as a part of the content. We do also, in many cases, recognize that this is actually the comment section so we need to treat it slightly differently. But ultimately if people are finding your pages based on the comments there then, if you delete those comments, then obviously we wouldn’t be able to find your pages based on that.

So that’s something where, depending on the type of comments that you have there, the amount of comments that you have, it can be the case that they provide significant value to your pages, and they can be a source of additional information about your pages, but it’s not always the case.

So that’s something where I think you need to look at the contents of your pages overall, the queries that are leading to your pages, and think about which of these queries might go away if comments were not on those pages anymore. And based on that you can try to figure out what to do there.

Mueller then concluded his statement by letting everyone know that Google does not ignore comments. If you happen to remove comments then you must expect some changes in respect to the search rankings.

It’s certainly not the case that we completely ignore all of the comments on a site. So just blindly going off and deleting all of your comments in the hope that nothing will change – I don’t think that will happen.

Check out Mueller’s full response in the video mentioned below: