If you are thinking of using a Search Engine Optimisation specialist to try to help your site move up Google’s rankings then one of the aspects of your site that the specialist will look at is the grammar that is used in your website’s content. It has long been known that poor grammar on a page can impact upon a website’s ranking. Google takes poor grammar as a signal that you are providing low quality content to users and low quality content will generally equate to lower rankings.

In a recent video Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web spambusting team, was asked the question if poor grammar in the comments of a blog could lead to the page getting lower rankings. Matt has said not to worry about this and that the quality of the grammar in the main content of the site is of far greater influence.

This is a logical way to look at the issue as a website owner is responsible for the main content of their website and so they have total control over the quality of the text that is used. However, if the site owner starts to edit the comments that are posted then they are effectively censoring the site. I appreciate that censorship of comments is necessary to a degree to prevent those who are trying to spam the site for inbound links to their own website or to prevent those that attempt to post grossly offensive material to a site. I think that allowing or disallowing a comment is fair enough but to actually edit the text that somebody else has written would not be a step too far, it would be a giant leap too far.

Those that post comments may not use the same first language as you and this can easily lead to a comment with poor quality grammar. Even if they are using the same language then there are often likely to be spelling mistakes or grammatical errors due to the fact that people tend to write comments very quickly with little thought to the wording or structure of the sentences that are used. It is similar to the way that many people see email as a less formal method of communication and as a result pay less attention to the accuracy of what they write. It would be unfair to punish a website that generates a lot of engagement with its users for the errors that the users of the site rather than the site owner.

If Google are not too concerned about grammatical errors in comments I think it is also fair to say that they will disregard errors in on page reviews of products and services.

If you are concerned that the quality of your text could be impacting on your search engine rankings then you could consider hiring a high quality copywriter. A copywriter can help to structure your text for you as well as correcting those grammatical errors.

You can see the full video below.