: Will your blog rank lower if you remove its comment section? Yesterday I noticed a warning in my Google Webmaster Tools. It told me that one of the posts on my blog had a slow load time

@Marchetta884

This is how I do for that situation.


Only how up to five comments until the user clicks a "show more" button.
Add "read more" links in the bottoms of comments that are too long, showing the rest of the comment when you click it.
Make sure your site has the meta description tag.
Always test your site on smartphones and flip phones for loading time.

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@Yeniel560

There are many things that relate to ranking, one very important is freshness, specially for blog posts, which means that yes, it may be affected by removing comments. Although, most comments are just garbage, and the only useful thing is the "live" they impart to a post, so if you are going to split things, the ones that you should move out are the oldest ones.

You have a few options to do this in a proper way


Use a dynamic script that loads more comments after the first 10 - 20. This way the page loads faster and you still may decide the order and quantity of the posts to appear.
Remove useless posts, things like spam, short answers like "yes", "me too", "i like this" and so on. Those short comments don't add anything but still carry HTML markup to present them.


You mention that you are trying to improve the speed of the page/site already, that's a good first step.

Also consider that if the only reason your post(s) is ranking number 1 is because of freshness, although it's good for you, doesn't mean that the content is much better that the competition. There are many posts on Internet that rank very high and they have 0 comments, either because the owner removed them or because they never allowed comments.

Of course I don't know the specifics of the post and your site, but consider all the elements involved.

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@YK1175434

If I were you, I didn't use separate pages to display comments because loading text is rarely a loading problem for a page.
That's why I think the problem is elsewhere. There are many possible reasons, maybe a script has been injected in one of your comments or a JS file takes a lot of time to load in your page.

Moreover, Google ranks pages and not sites. Therefore, If you modified a page and your site has slipped to #2 for one of your keywords, it's not linked in general.

However, indeed, comments are good for SEO because they affect positively a page (because of freshness as you mentioned). A new comment updates the page and specifies to Googlebot your page is still alive; you thus have chance that Google keeps your page in the top of the results in its index.

My advise is thus to analyze your page to find the problem. The console of Safari or Chrome or Firebug for Firefox can help you for this.

P.S.: I also think resubmitting the sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools has nothing to do with this.

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