## 5 Discussion  
The findings of this study prove that around the world, there seems to be a similar pattern regarding the number of news companies that use multiple comment platforms and social media accounts in order to allow users to comment on their provided content (Figures 7 and 8). Those results revealed, support the arguments of [PERSON] and [PERSON] [(33; 40)] regarding the practices of news media organizations. The news companies around the world are employing, in some cases, similar techniques to promote their content via commenting. This development seems to be related to the SEO practices that the last decade have become crucial for the financial survival of the news websites. Comments have an important impact in social influence, and information diffusion in relation to users and society. Moreover, the raw and strong content along with the participation of the users via likes, shares, and similar interactions can influence the SEO metrics and improve the popularity of a website [(25; 26; 27; 32)]. Figure 6: The Results of the Study for the Cypriot News Websites for the Commenting Platforms (n = 128). Additionally, the current study raises questions about the overall operation of news websites throughout the globe. The majority of the news websites were not using social media accounts or multiple commenting platforms for allowing the users to comment on their news articles (RQ1 and RQ2). These findings are considered significant in the sense that there is no other systematic research until today in the field of journalism and communication that focuses on investigating if the news websites of the globe follow the SEO practices in relation to users' comments. The aforementioned results for the research questions of this study are probably related to the difficulty of managing the comments of the websites. More specifically, in the few last years there has been a huge debate about the regulation of the comments, as there are cases in which the users promote hate speech, racism, and stereotypes. Social media platforms, such as YouTube and Facebook, were used in the past as a tool from promoting hate against minorities [50]. In this new reality, there is a high chance that the news organizations are afraid of taking the blame for such extreme polarization and for promoting hate. Another important reason for deleting the comments might be the low quality content  
Figure 8: The Results of the Study for the Second Research Question. Figure 7: The Results of the Study for the First Research Question. provided by the users, which is considered to affect, in a negative way, the ranking of a website [28]. The usage of Facebook as a commenting platform is an expected finding because it is supposed to be one of the most popular social media platforms of the world [20]. However, this finding comes against the importance of users' comments as an SEO practice in the sense that the use of a different platform for comments, such as Facebook does not help with improving the relevant Google ranking. On the contrary, it has the opposite effect, as the engagement and interaction are not happening on the website [30]. Moreover, it does not help in building an active community on the website, which would otherwise result again in improving the visibility of the website, as it is considered to be an SEO practice [31]. In addition, the commenting platforms, such as Disqus, can affect, in a good or bad way, the ranking of the website. Because the platform takes time to load the comments, there is a high chance that Google will not index the comments of the website. If the quality is strong, then the website loses visibility, as the high engagement of the users is not evaluated despite it being an SEO practice [29]. Another noteworthy finding of this research is the expansion of the relevant literature for the Greek and Cypriot online media system. One would have thought that there would be major differences between the news websites of the international news organizations and those of Greek and Cypriot news outlets.