I am weird, I love user-generated comments and while tons of blogs removed them ages and ages ago, I kept them here. I do my best to remove the spam comments and keep the comments that are not spam. John Mueller of Google recently said he would not noindex pages with comments, instead, he would remove the spam comments and keep the good comments.

John wrote on Twitter “I would not noindex pages with comments.” Just said “you just need to make sure that they’re the kind of content that you want to publish on your site.” “Some comments can be quite useful, other comments are just spam. Keep the good ones,” he added.

Totally agree but if you cannot manage the comments on your site, then you probably want to disable comments in general. To noindex pages with comments so search engines do not see them but users do see them, that doesn’t make much sense. You want to make sure what you show users is as good or better than what you show search engines.

Here are those tweets:

I would not noindex pages with comments — you just need to make sure that they’re the kind of content that you want to publish on your site. Some comments can be quite useful, other comments are just spam. Keep the good ones.

— 🥔 johnmu (personal) updated for 2022 🥔 (@JohnMu) August 23, 2022

Forum discussion at Twitter.