For past couple of months I have been working on a new WordPress SEO plugin, trying to continue the long tradition of my SEO plugins like SEO Friendly Images and SEO Smart Links.
The plugin works around the idea of putting blog comments on "steroids", and basically using them to super charge your blog's SEO. And with the recently announced change in Google's way of treating nofollow links and the intrigue it brought up, the whole concept just got a new kick.
And the actual idea is quite simple. Bear with me.
Concept behind SEO Super Comments
For each user comment we will create a new dynamic page on the blog, holding the actual comment information. This page will not actually exist in WordPress database, but we will create it dynamically using a WordPress plugin.
What we instantly get in this way is big jump in site's index visible to search engines. This is possible because blog comments are crawl-able, index-able and most importantly rank-able content. Also meaning you will start to get search engine traffic for the context of the comment.
The old author link in the comments will now lead to the newly generated page. Author's URL will still be displayed (and we can do-follow it now as it will be only one external link on the page).
The concept relies around optimizing the target page using title and H1 tag using the context of the comment. So basically we will take the excerpt of the comment and use it to create the page title and H1 tag and in the body we will old the content of the comment (plus some more goodies, read on).
Since now all comments normally drain page rank even when nofollowed (bad for your site) the whole idea of using them to generate links back to your site instead and get free indexable content along the way, looks just much more appealing.
To spice things up, the dynamic comment page concept additionally features:
- List of author's other comments on the post are presented (good value for the visitor, more content)
- List of author's other comments on the blog (even more content, chance to interlink to your other posts, more value to the visitor)
- Author url links are do-followed (option, but why not?)
- Extra few clicks generated will increase your pageviews, lower the bounce rate and increase any CPM advertsing revenue
- I have also created a mod for hugely popular XML sitemaps plugin to include all the new dynamic comment pages into your sitemap, so that the search engines can index the pages more quickly.
Preliminary results of the SEO Super Comments concept testing
In best tradition of 'eating one's own dog food' I have decided to test the concept and the plugin on my own site.
Two days ago I installed the plugin (no other changes are necessary to the blog, everything is automatic).
There were couple of things that I noticed:
- Google seems to have liked it very much. It 'swallowed' around 1,500 comment pages in the first day (gulp!)
- Search engine traffic to the new pages started coming the very first day as the graph below shows (I created a segment in Google Analytics to filter out traffic to comment pages; learn how to do that here)
Google Analytics Segment for Super Comments pages
The gain in index size for the site is massive. Although my site has only 290 posts, I do have over 6,000 comments which all are indexable separately now as pages.
The user experience is enhanced because I am able to see other comments by the same user across the topic or the entire site by clicking their name. Here is an example.
All users can get dofollow links back to their site as well as there is now only one external link on the page (this is of course at the discretion of webmaster).
The best of all, this new traffic is primarily for long tail phrases.
The users of search engines are getting more savvy and increasingly using long tail searches (I've seen a Google's chart showing 45% of all search is long tail currently).
The comment pages immediately started ranking on page 1 of search results for a huge number of phrases as the landing keywords from my test illustrate below.
SEO Super Comments is great source of long tail traffic
For a better illustration of benefits of long tail search you can quickly refer to the graph below.
Conclusion
If your site has a lot of comments, think of them about one big resource capable of generating free search traffic. This is what SEO Super Comments concept is about. Oh, and it deals with the recently announced nofollow behavior quite well.
I hope to tweak and finish the plugin in next few days, incorporating few more ideas I have. I acknowledge that usability can still be improved, remember this is just an SEO concept.
Continue reading:
- SEO Super Comments
- SEO Super Comments WordPress plugin released
- Mind your comments, someone may be watching
Posted in: SEO
TAGS:basic seo concept, blog comments seo, can start seo, comment seo, concept search engine optimization, google seo concept, gragh shows, graph shows, long tail, new seo, new seo concept, seo commenting list, seo super comments disqus, wordpress nofollow comments, wordpress seo, wordpress seo concept
Hi! My name is Vladimir Prelovac. I am a computer engineer by profession and an adventurer by state of mind.
41 Comments
V. 0.3.1 wp- 2.8.1 php 5.2.5 Clean install with default theme.
Unable to make this plugin work. The author link (/?cid=325)goes back to the home page, not to an author comments page. In fact the same is happening here on your site http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/presenting-seo-super-comments-concept?cid=13753 simply redirect back to this post. It should go to Rarst's other comments.
Maybe some bugs to squash?
Thanks for the information and tips. Cordial greetings from Germany and a nice day.
Plugin is released now http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/seo-super-comments-wordpress-plugin-released
I can't wait to install this plugin on my own site
Please let me know when this pludin will be released to the public Vladimir..
Thanks
Now, for even better SEO we'd have to permalink the "?cid=13683" or something, right?
So (basedir)/low-bounce-rate-wordpress-themes?cid=13683
becomes
(basedir)/low-bounce-rate-wordpress-themes/my-stats-in-last-month
Or at least something more SEO friendly. Even
(basedir)/low-bounce-rate-wordpress-themes?cid=my-stats-in-last-month
is an improvement.
Thats something which help alot of people get good ranking,
would be waiting for it to be released,
Amazing idea and will see how it works in life :)
Waiting for released also...
Extra ordinarily!
Sajna ideja, kao i uvek ;)
Well, the graph shows 200% more inbound traffic from search engines after you activated your plugin. That looks like a traffic magnet! And who doesn't want something like that?
Most of the comments on this my ask and answer specific questions. Being able to set the comments up the way you are suggesting would be invaluable for both my readers and for others who are searching for those answers.
I can't wait to try it out.
daj mi da probam :)
waiting for it : )
This is a great plug in man. I am really excited to try it on my site. I am looking forward to this new SEO plug in.
This is a great idea. I'm with you on the long tail SEO tactics. Seems visitors coming to my main E-commerce site through long tail terms are a higher quality visitor than those via the main terms we've spent so long on. They know what they want and buy more.
I finally understood why your comments aren't working as one would 'normally' expect :)
The one change I would do is leave the commenter's url link in a "Webpage" link with the title 'John Doe's Webpage'. The name will link to the comment page and will also have a title like 'See more comments from John Doe'. This could make the adoption of the new pattern easier by users.
Sometimes it's ok to break the pattern and I look forward for this new plugin.
Sounds like a great concept, I can't wait for it to be released so I can try it out :)
This is very interesting. Would love to see it in action on my site!
A very interesting SEO concept. I have a current project I can't wait to test this out on. Let us know when the new plugin is available.
Very clever. I think this plugin might be a little bit popular.
@Vladimir
Sure! I am not bashing the idea, just thinking aloud on specific aspects. :)
On my blog I don't have terrible lots of comments but many of those are extremely extensive (longer than post they are made in response to) and valuable.
This might be interesting to try. I am planning to make next theme as flexible as possible exactly so I can rapidly add, test and remove such features.
@Rarst:
1. The link is found on the comment page. Together with other comments by the same user on the blog. That is an extra click but doesn't have to be a bad thing.
2. Bounce rate on these pages is roughly inline with the rest of the site. There is a link to the original post the user is likely to click. Also other comments are present. The page can be designed and enriched with content (excerpt from original post, similar posts etc).
I acknowledge that usability can be improved, remember this is just an SEO concept.
This sounds great!!
Is there a realising date?
Traffic is always nice. But usability is questionable. It was noticed by the way, at least by me and other person who was confused by it in bounce post.
1. What about people who are already on the blog and want to check out link on other commenters? They are made to go through useless page and might actually never get what they want because common pattern is broken.
2. Landing on page centered around comment is kinda confusing as well. How well your icnoming traffic to those pages reacts?
WOW! This is killer.
I can't wait for it to be released and install it as soon as it is available.