Does user comments affect Google ranks ?

I’m sure someone would have noticed it already but I haven’t seen any discussions on this yet.

Okay the reason for this question is a search results page for a recently popular term. Before getting into it, an idea of what exactly am I trying to discuss –

I found that some blogs, which have no or less backlinks, a not-so-good onsite optimization done, and comparatively unpopular traffic profile ranks high for a range of search terms stemming from a single keyword, because they have a post that’s gone very popular with lots of comments on a single story (that’s related to the keyword).

I have seen this phenomenon so far on two blogs with evidence, and have spotted it on many other blogs without one.

Basically, these blogs wouldn’t have written this article targeting any search term what so ever. From hat I’ve seen, they’re all the genuine blogger who rants about things that excite them. And may be because of their post timing, once there is a trend on the related search term, the post takes on a rolling snowball mode, gathering comments for whatever traffic it picks up and becomes a huge success with comments. At one point, it picks up hundreds and thousands of comments that the post body would be only a few paragraphs and the comments stream goes up to pages. And the article ranks almost number one for all the related search terms to the primary keyword.

Let’s try some examples.

Example 1 -  I had posted this story about iPhone launch in India and why it could be a disappointment in India (Nofollow link) on my low traffic personal blog. When I wrote the post, there were no articles that took a negative stand to the iPhone India launch. So this post sort of “acted” as a flame bait, and because of the content, it gathered up lot of comments. Not much but it was all in time span of one-two days. The article ranked number one for terms such as “iphone India” during that time.(Different story now)

Example 2 – There is a post on this blog about booking Tata Nano car.(Nofollow link) It does not have the best optimized copy, nor is it a high profile website with awesome traffic, nor does it have a big list of backlinks. But this particular article, for its uniqueness and publishing time, got a lot of attention as people started commenting on it. It was posted in Jan, and the “buzz” about Tata Nano booking started only recently. And because I’ve been tracking the Tata Nano story closely, I’ve seen that this website ranks on the top positions for almost anything related to “Tata Nano Booking”. Which is interesting.

Taking into consideration all the regional influences and the like, there are only a few reasons that I can think of for these blogs to rank high for a particular term with no or less effort.

- Publishing time – These posts were made at a time well in advance, even before people started talking about it. So they might have the time advantage.

- Niche Popularity – These articles made a niche popularity for themselves. If you check the other articles on the blog, you’ll find that none of them are as popular as this one story.

- More comments – They have a high number of comments, all relevant and sticking to the initial topic.

Though it is immature to make any decision based on these examples, I think they are good pointers that tells us that -

- Any young blog can make it to the top of SERPS, provided you are genuine and have  a seriously interesting story.

- The crowd and community can create wonders in helping you promote your site.

- Google and the other SE’s have to believe the crowd, even if the site is fairly new or unpopular.

I think that’s fair enough. Looking forward to your thoughts and arguments.

Note: I haven’t dugg to any deeper metrics here. But I guess the point is clear and evident.

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