If your blog does not have comments, will you take a hit from Google in regards to organic search placement? I’ve done a little bit of research on this topic and feel that instead of worrying about comments or lack of comments, it is more important to consider your blog post bounce rate.
People are busy. Even I don’t routinely comment on blogs I read, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t find reading them to be of no value. Actually I spend 30 minutes every day reading industry blogs and news.
What I feel Google is considering more important than the number of comments is engagement and stickiness. If your blog has no comments, but people are there longer than 5 seconds and dig deeper into your content and your bounce rate is under 70% for a blog post, you most likely are not in trouble with Google.
The types of blogs that get punished for poor performance are those that are either built for advertising links, are scraping content from other resources, or have one and two line blog posts.
If you are taking time to write a thoughtful blog on a topic that matches your main authority – even without blog comments your website will still be consider meaningful to Google. Just take a look at the search results to know this is true as Google is showing even comment-less blog posts in their index.
What Google can monitor more closely than the number of comments back on your own site is click through and bounce rate – right from the Google.com page.
So if you don’t have comments on your blog, not to worry. Some of the biggest sites in the industry (like Copyblogger) have actually turned off commenting.
If you need to get blogging and have content worth reading, I invite you to check out our blog writing services and pricing.