## 6 Conclusions and Limitations  
This study provides findings for a topic that has not been researched extensively in the field of communication. The SEO practices of the news websites regarding the comments on the websites are supposed to be an essential factor for the popularity of the websites. By commenting, the users provide free of charge, fresh and robust content, which, in some cases, provokes interactions, further engagement, and the users spend more time on the website. Besides, commenting is a form of social influence and information diffusion. Despite improving the visibility of news websites, the comments can even result in changing the opinions of the users. However, this research shows also that the news websites do not seem to invest a lot of time in improving their visibility via users' comments. By using social media platforms and slow comment systems, they seem to lose the strong content of the users, which is considered to be an important SEO practice. Via the regulation of the comments, the news websites would have been able to maintain strong discussions on their websites and even build communities. Therefore, they would have been ranked higher in the relevant rankings. Additionally, this study reveals that there are standard practices concerning commenting throughout the world, Greece, and Cyprus. Until today there was no systematic research in the field of journalism and communication that has evaluated the way that users comment on news websites. It seems that a significant number of news websites do not choose to use social media accounts or multiple comment platforms for allowing the users to comment on their news articles. This finding is probably linked with the crucial problem of been blamed for not regulating the harmful content of the website and the low-quality content created by the users. Further, it seems that they are not willing to take the risk of regulating the content in a more efficient way, such as not using slow comment systems and popular social media, such as Facebook. These concerns have to be addressed for increasing the visibility of the news websites, thus the information diffusion and the social influence of the news. Regarding the limitations of this study, it can be argued that the list provided from alexa.com restricted the examined sample and results. The results seem significant in the sense that this research is one of the first studies focusing on the field of news information and communication, but a different list may offer different results from this study. Furthermore, Greece and Cyprus seem to support the way the most popular news websites function, in relation to the comments of the users. However, other countries, for example, those from Asia, may provide different results. Thus, the researchers of this study will try to replicate the same study in Asian countries to further expand, the existing literature. The relationship between SEO and comments on news media websites is a new research topic, and, as a result, there is a lack of research for this specific topic in the field. We believe that for the future, there is a need for a more thorough investigation, via different research methods such as surveys, content analysis, and examining even the traffic of the news media websites. Conceptualization, M.-A.K. ; methodology, M.-A.K., E.L., M.K., and N.A. ; software, M.-A.K., E.L., M.K., and N.A. ; validation, M.-A.K. ; formal analysis, M.-A.K., E.L., M.K., and N.A. ; investigation, M.-A.K., E.L., M.K., and N.A. ; resources, M.-A.K., E.L., M.K., and N.A. ; data curation, M.-A.K., E.L., M.K., and N.A. ; writing--original draft preparation, M.-A.K., E.L., M.K., and N.A. ; writing--review and editing, M.-A.K., and N.A. ; visualization, M.-A.K., E.L., M.K., and N.A. ; supervision, N.A. ; project administration, N.A. ; funding acquisition, M.-A.K. This article is based on research undertaken by the lead author with a doctoral student at Hong Kong Baptist University, supported by the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme (HKPPS).