The UGC is not a trend to be taken lightly, in fact, it could be said that today it is one of the main trends in IT sector, mainly due to the influence that this type of content has on users. Recently the Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, John Mueller has defined that there is no discrimination between the User Generated Content and the Main Content when it is about ranking of a website. The use of user generated content (UGC) both on the Internet and on social media for advertising and digital marketing purposes in the tourism sector is becoming a trend, in such a way that this influences consumers when making decisions about your purchase options for products and services. Travel and tourism brands have set their sights on this trend ever since social media and content marketing first came on the scene and opened their eyes to the power of authenticity.

What does User Generated Content Mean After all?

High-quality content makes companies more recognizable. However, not all have the budget to create the amount that satisfies the Google algorithm. It is here where the user generated content or UGC acquires special relevance. User Generated Content is also known as clients, and then shared on social media. The effect that user-generated content has on a business depends on the type you plan to collect and how you use it. If the goal is to increase brand awareness, an Instagram hash tag campaign can help create buzz about the product or service. If you are looking to drive website conversions, an action that prompts customer reviews may be the social proof needed to increase sales.

UGC plays an important role in ranking of a web page

However, if you don’t know that how Google ranks a website on its search engine then in a YouTube video series of Ask Google Webmasters, John Mueller told that Google puts the web pages on rank according to relevancy and quality of the content no matter if it is a User Generated content or your own main content.

Before this fact, most of the people thought that only main content is enough to put a website on rank no matter how much spam is in the comment section which is a User Generated Content area. But now, it is clear that UGC is as important as the Main Content. So, if there is a lot of spam on your website in user generated content then you better make sure to remove that content if it is not relevant to your web page.

Should you keep User Generated Content or not?

John Mueller said in his YouTube video that if you want to block the spam webpages to be indexed, you can use noindex robots meta tag <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>. Perhaps, if you are happy with the user generated content which is relevant to your web page and if you think that that can be helpful in the ranking of your webpage, you can keep that.