Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, answers a question about spelling and grammar in his latest Webmaster Help video where a user writes in to ask:
Should I correct the grammar on comments to my WordPress blog? Should I not approve comments with poor grammar? Will approving comments with grammar issues affect my page’s quality ratings?
Matt seemed to be amused by this question, but goes on to say that you should not worry too much about the grammar in user comments as long as the grammar on your own page is fine.
Matt understands there are people online who post things that don’t always make a lot of sense. One visit to YouTube will give you a glimpse of the type of nonsense comments that get posted to the web on a regular basis. That being said, Matt says poorly written comments have no affect on the ability to rank.
Just make sure that your own content is high quality, Matt reiterates. While comments with poor spelling grammar aren’t something to be concerned about, you should still watch out for spam comments.
It’s pretty easy to tell the difference between a comment left by a spam bot and a comment left by a real person. As long as the comment appears to have been left by a real person, but the spelling and grammar may not be perfect, it’s still ok to accept the comment without correcting, Matt says.
Poorly written comments reflect more on the person leaving the comment than the site on which the comment was posted. So don’t stress out about it.
Thank goodness because we already have enough to worry about as SEOs, imagine if we also had to correct the spelling and grammar of every comment we received? Good grief!
To hear Matt’s response in his own words, please see the video below:
