Crazy idea: Would marking up your WP comments section and adding fake comments reclassify site as UGC?

[BakerStreet]

We all know UGC got a buffer in the SERPs lately. I had an idea over lunch today, what if I mark up the WP comments section as questions and answers (or it already is?) and put in fake comments? Would it reclassify my site as UGC?

I'm asking because I see dumb ass stackexchange pages ranking with like 5 people discussing a subject. Seems like UGC content has a much lower quality threshold than written content. Anybody know more about this? Wouldn't be hard to add the markup to single.php and make a few fake comments w/ AI.

 

[Politico]

I've gone back and forth on this question. Not fake comments, but opening comments back on my sites. I remember years ago that there was a correlation between my best ranking pages and the highest number of comments on the page. But then when I was doing some speed optimizations for WP, I just disabled them altogether.

 

[chubes]

It would be no different than having real comments IMO. As long as they aren't obviously fake comments...

Comments are useful but they also increase the DOM size and can slow down a page. They also attract lots of annoying spam that is hard to completely stop. I use them on my big site and like them. They're turned off and fully eradicated via php code on my others because I don't want to deal with it.

Also, I haven't seen any of my post comments showing up as UGC. I don't think it really works that way because a blog post is not a discussion. You'd have to convert all of your existing content into a forum format or somehow trick Google into seeing your blog as a forum. Or put the comments on a separate page, which defeats the purpose.

Trying to trick Google into thinking your blog posts are UGC also seems like a shady practice and it's probably better to just add a real forum to your site. Sounds likely to backfire.

 

[NotaLawyer]

As long as you (someone with an author profile on the site) respond to the comments, it might be a good test to see if opening up comments helps.

 

[Smith]

I've also heard other people (e.g. Kyle Roof) talk about using comments to add NLP/semantic terms without completely editing the page content. So you might find other ways to add value beyond UGC.

 

[NotaLawyer]

I've also heard other people (e.g. Kyle Roof) talk about using comments to add NLP/semantic terms without completely editing the page content. So you might find other ways to add value beyond UGC.

Entities are important. Run the content through Google's NLP API and see what classification and entities it spits back. I usually only care about the first 3, but it is interesting to see a slightly bigger list. We currently use that as a form of QA check for content but I'm working on expanding the scope out a bit more.

That could be an interesting way to feed auto comments - pass entities to OpenAI API with a good prompt how to use them, and then auto generate comments.

 

[Kaj Kandler]

I think it is a good engagement signal for Google.

The "fake" must be believable in terms of diverse writing styles, profiles, etc. - Not sure if it is worth the effort to fake hundreds of comments if you don't get also inbound links from other sites and social media that confirm the engagement.