Valuable content in Comments section. Better for SEO if in-page?

[Broadway]

I have a website where in the comments section at the bottom of pages people frequently post interesting and intelligent questions about that page's content. (Who would have thought?)

I usually go into great detail in replying to those comments. The quality of my responses is usually every bit as qualified and informative as the page's actual content.

My question is this:

Does Google depreciate or devalue sightly the importance of content found in the comments section of a page, because they can tell it's in the page's comments section and know how much riff raff often gets put into user submitted sections?

It wouldn't take much for me to carve these questions/answers out of the comments section and formally place them in my page's text. I just don't know if that's important to do from a SEO point of view.

[aristotle]

Doesn't the answer depend on how well the site is doing now?

My view is that you shouldn't make any un-needed changes to sites and/or pages that are already ranking high in google, since you would be risking a lot in hopes of gaining very little.

On the other hand, if a site is doing poorly, then you don't have much to lose by making changes.

In other words, in my opinion you should weigh the potential risk vs potential reward

[Broadway]

Okay, so I guess no need for making changes.
I thought I was going to find that content in comments was depreciated just like links and Footers are. But evidently that's not necessarily the case.

[lucy24]

in the comments section at the bottom of pages people frequently post interesting and intelligent questions about that page's content. (Who would have thought?)

I usually go into great detail in replying to those comments. The quality of my responses is usually every bit as qualified and informative as the page's actual content.

The paradox is that you are only able to do this wonderful thing because the site is comparatively small. If you had hundreds or thousands of daily comments you wouldn’t be able to interact with them as carefully.

[aristotle]

I thought I was going to find that content in comments was depreciated just like links and Footers are. But evidently that's not necessarily the case.

Well I think it probably is depreciated to some degree, but how much is the question. Is it enough to take the risk the risk of changing the structure of your site? As I said, I think it depends on how much you have to lose.

You might try doing it on one or two pages to see what happens, and if it works out, then slowly do the other pages.

[tangor]

UGC is not as valuable as content, however, if you interact with the UGC and in the process create new content, then clip that, put in a supplement page to the one the UGC is on as an expansion. Meanwhile, there's not much gain either way.

[suvaance]

From Google point of view, content in UGC section won't help you much. As it is much below in the page, Google will consider it of less importance. In recent SMX, they mentioned that you have to place the most important part of content in top.

From users point of view, it doesn't matter as long as you engage with your users qualitatively by sharing your thoughts through reply. In fact if users are really interested in your content and active in your site, then no need to think further.

Rather than going for another page, while replying, if you feel it is a worth piece to share as a separate post, then write a new post on that and share the link in the comment so that the readers of the existing post will definitely take interest to read the new one.

[nomis5]

I'm in exactly the same situation as the OP. I came to the conclusion recently that content in the comments section was downgraded as far as Google was concerned.even though the content is as useful to readers as the main article.

My solution was going to be to place all the comments/answers in a separate page and link to it from the main article. I even went so far as to do exactly that for one page a couple of days ago.

Then yesterday I saw one of my comments / answers appear in the knowledge box so now I have no idea whether to go ahead and create lots of new comments / answers page or leave well alone.

My gut instinct is to proceed with plan of creating lots of comments / answers pages. It may have a negative impact in the short run but in the long run I believe it will have a positive impact. But at the moment I am in "not sure, dithering" mode and can't get out of it.

[aristotle]

In my opinion it's more user-friendly to keep everything on one page. If it were me, I would try to change the source code to make the comments look like regular content.

[nomis5]

^ It may sound simple to do that but if you are supplied with a question and you provide an answer then the options to merge that into the regular content is very difficult.

Having thought about it more, I think it's best to separate the Q/A into a separate page.

[linkbuildr]

Keeps people on your site longer and more in depth content..definitely can't hurt.

[dethfire]

Google flat out distrusts UGC unless you are Quora or stack exchange or some other VC backed venture.

[JesterMagic]

It also depends how you have your comments setup. I switch to newest first a number of years ago as the pages stay relevant years later (I keep them updated) but I found having older dates of the comments was hurting the page (hence the switch). Switching to newest first means my comments get pushed down eventually (the lower on the page the less the text is important in Googles eyes). So if it is really good I may quote it in the article or include a little bit of info about it and the use a hypertext Reference so the user can jump down to the comment if they want.