Has it become increasingly important to fix spelling/grammar in blog comments?

[pokeraussie]

With the rollout of various panda updates that has shaken up the SERPs, do you believe it could be detrimental to rankings if you have a lot of blog comments with spelling/grammar mistakes?

[yeahfree2]

without really answering the question, i can imagine that google is able to determine which part is the content part and which part is the comments part. since you can not influence the comments part besides from deleting them i can imagine that having comments is more important than the spelling of the comments.

[pokeraussie]

Yes I would imagine the # of comments is more important then the spelling/grammar, but with that being said, does approving these kinds of comments reflect on the quality of the blog? I am not sure.

[yeahfree2]

i think it's all a matter of combined signals. i mean, if i would post a news article that pokerstars has been shut down world wide it would go viral, getting lots of signals, tweets, links, etc, but also a lot of very negative comments with a lot of spelling mistakes.

if there would be a website about cancer with a new break trough, the level of the article would be higher educated most likely, as well as the comments (hopefully).

i don't have the knowledge and i'm only thinking out loud, i prefer to have comments with bad spelling rather than no comments.

[Michael Martinez]

Do you have an idea of how many comments on a particular blog (I assume you have one in mind) have these kinds of mistakes? I think the signal may be more a matter of scale than of fact. That is, it's not simply "Yes, this page has grammatical or spelling errors" but maybe more like "this page as X% possible grammar errors and Y% possible spelling errors".

It's really, really hard for a search engine to determine what are grammar and spelling errors, even though Google advises people to watch for those things in their guidelines.

[parttimepoker]

Pokerstars has been shut down worldwide??????

....

I don't think Google has much trouble finding spelling errors, as evidenced by the fact that they offer spell-corrected search results almost 100% of the time that I misspell a query.

I would also imagine Google has little trouble discerning comments from the core content, and would discount the text from comments significantly when analyzing a page.

There are a couple of WP plugins that deal with spell checking comments, but I think most are complete comment systems.