Is User Generated Content (UGC) a Google Ranking Factor or not?

Have you ever used User Generated Content on your website or blog? Do you want to know if your UGC content is a Google ranking factor or not?

User-Generated Content (UGC) is available in social media posts, review posts, blog comments, and ratings.


Is UGC (User Generated Content) a Google Ranking Factor or not?: eAskme
Is UGC (User Generated Content) a Google Ranking Factor or not?: eAskme

The most common reason sites and blogs allow user-generated content is to gain momentum, popularity, and engagement. With the help of UGC content, you can add more users and more content to your website without putting any effort.

Forum posts, ratings, social media tagging, and blog comments are UGC content that can be used to increase word count on pages.

But will your UGC content affect organic ranking?

Here is what you should know about the Google rankings and User Generated Content.

Claim: User Generated Content is a Google Ranking Factor

First, understand what user-generated content is?

Content created and added by the users on your website is known as UGC.

Users can use images, text, videos, comments, reviews, ratings, etc.

You can use user-generated content to improve your website or blog engagement and improve your SEO.

Popular eCommerce sites like Amazon are using user reviews to improve their business.

But is it a Google ranking factor?

Let’s find out.

User-Generated Content is a Google ranking Factor:

Google has shared a user-generated spam document in the Search Central Advanced SEO section.

It says that spammy users can generate malicious content on your website. If your website has too much spammy user-generated content, then Google can take manual action on the site.

Google has also talked about comment spam prevention.

Low-quality comments can negatively impact the ranking of the overall website. Google can remove or downrank such pages.

John Muller has also talked about how Google ranks user-generated content or pages.

John has said that Google does not differentiate between your content and UGC content. And this is the reason why they consider user-generated content as your content, and it affects your ranking.

If you have massive users adding links on your website, you should use the rel=”ugc” attribute to tell Google that the link is user-generated.

User-generated spammy content can negatively impact your ranking.

Conclusion: User Generated Content As a Google Search Ranking Factor

We know that Google considers user-generated content and content created by you both as your content. And content is a major ranking factor.

It means that user-generated content is also a Google search ranking factor.

If you do not take care of UGC spam, then it will negatively impact the ranking of your website or blog.

You should tell users about the content publishing guidelines of your website and ensure that user-generated content should have quality.

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