Comments on wordpress affecting search engine ranking?

I have 4 new websites (2 months old), all optimised for 1 specific keyword phrase. 1 of the sites is on page 2 of Google and the comments on the blog are all unapproved. The other 3 sites are nowhere in the top ten and the comments are mostly automatically approved on these 3 blogs - a lot of spam. Is it coincidence or can all these comments affect my standing in the eyes of the great and mighty G? I am relatively new to wordpress, so forgive please if this is a naive question, I have researched a bit but cannot find a definitive answer. My SEO is VERY specific and the keywords for all 4 sites have roughly the same competition.

Tx in advance

Not sure, but I would assume that the less relevant the comments are, the less relevant the page will be classed. If you were to somehow set it so that only comments that have the keywords are approved, then the spiders would LOVE it. I am now sure how they classify this though, I think it is simply about which words are mostly associated with each other on the page(or something like that).

I blasted a site on WP. It went from PR 1 to PR 3 but actually dropped in Google.

If ScrapeBox can see if a page is open to comment on then it should be no problem at all for Google to do and even to see if the comment section is busy.
Next thing to do for Google is to assume that the more comments on a page there are, the more the content is liked and thus the more valuable to it's readers.
I believe Matt Cuntts announced that Google is going to value social media more in it's rankings, I think it is very fesible that they will consider voting and comment systems as well. Perhaps not in the same way as they would do, say, Twitter tweets but still..

Interesting stuff.

I tested this matter a while ago and the result was SAME!

I opened up two garbage info domains with auto blogs, the exact same plugins and theme. I made decent SEO and blasted them with Scrapebox (all the same lists) and yes both of them are on the same niche but gets different keywords.

I made one of them AutoApproved and it is spammed to death a month ago (after a list is shared here with some URLs were in that list) and the other is Closed to Comments.

The spammed one is failing to achieve anything but the Non Comments one is going up on ranks.

It may be a coincidence but I am somehow thinking about the same thing.

I had that thought a while ago, blog posts with quality comments do help out, at least that's how I feel based on my Google Analytic tracking.