User Generated Content: Seize Opportunities and Secure Quality
How UGC works, which risks bring quality and spam and how you moderate contributions in a meaningful way.
The topic often decides whether content is only available or actually meets the search intention. Usually, the biggest lever lies in better tailoring, clearer utility and less in mere amount of text.
How UGC works, which risks bring quality and spam and how you moderate contributions in a meaningful way. This wiki page arranges the topic practically and shows, When priority arises, which mistakes are often and how you derive concrete measures from them.
UGC can be very valuable, but it needs moderation, spam protection, clear structure and helpful contextual signals. Especially forum and community content benefit from quality control and good internal linking.
Example: A comment contains a foreign advertising link
A user adds an unsuitable link under a specialist article. Check the content and moderation rules instead of automatically publishing each user contribution. For links from user content, rel=ugc can indicate the context of creation.
Link marking does not replace moderation of spam, harmful content or personal information. Good user contributions can complement your own experiences. The decisive factor is whether they enrich the question of the page and can be published in a permanently responsible manner.
Examples of USG
All comments on social media and product reviews, as clearly displayed on strong sales portals such as Amazon, are USG and are considered to be strong drivers for the ranking of a website.
The example of customer reviews on Amazon is quite useful for analyzing the SEO effect of USG. As is well known, Amazon very clearly shows the positive and negative reviews (most helpful positive and helpful negative review). Among the reviews, threads sometimes develop, i.e. comments or inquiries from other users about the submitted comment, new answers and, in this way, long internal conversations into a single comment.
Amazon also provides a mini-FAQ for each product, where users can ask questions about the product that other users or the seller answer. This creates a lot of content that comes completely from the users.
Effects of User Generated Content
USG basically achieves two major effects for search engine optimization and other areas of online marketing.
- #1: For Them SEO is USG due to the many accesses and the mostly long Dwell time The user is useful. Users read the comments, respond to them in the best case, ask questions and write new comments themselves. Many accesses from many different IP addresses and a long dwell time are for the Google bots a signal that the page is important: it ranks better.
- #2: That Online marketing is based not only on search engine optimization (which is one of its sub-areas), but also on useful and authentic information. And they increase it. Trustee One side (confidence bonus). We all know that we trust a customer review much more than a provider’s advertising promise.
These effects can also be seen in the field of social media, even if it is not always about products and advertising. Basically, all postings with many comments are considered useful and are prominently displayed both in the search engine and internally in a social network such as YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok & Co.
Is user-generated content something fundamentally new?
No, it is not, even if some authors from online marketing portray it that way (even on Wikipedia). There has always been content that came from the audience and was perceived as important by the audience itself. Also, the editorial letter section of a classic newspaper attracts a lot of attention and can even lead to a question-and-answer game, if the editorial staff of the newspaper also prints answers to editorial letters. That would be the modern thread in a print edition.
Even the filtering by an editorial office that allows for certain content, i.e. prints one letter to the editor but not the other, still takes place: Operators of websites have to make sure that not everything is published (hate speech, diatribe, etc.), which is nowadays done with modern filter functions. The discussions about such content in social networks are sufficiently well known.
Anyone who runs a website and relies on USG (for example with the approval of comments), must therefore basically strike a balance between the benefit for SEO and a potentially negative feedback, which can grow into a shitstorm in the worst case.