The whole concept behind the plugin is presented in Presenting SEO Super Comments Concept which I suggest reading.
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 advertising 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. Download the modified files here and replace them in the plugin folder (works for plugin version 3.1.2, experts only!)
Download
Installation & Usage
- Upload the whole plugin folder to your /wp-content/plugins/ folder.
- Go to the Plugins page and activate the plugin.
- Use the Options page to change your options
- That is all. You can check your posts for new links.
New from version 0.6
I added the option to specify 'friendly' websites that have their links intact, and also dofollowed.
This adds you the possibility to send some of your high ranking page PR juice to a friendly site.
Disclaimer
The concept behind SEO Super Comments is experimental. You are using the plugin on your own responsibility.
Need WordPress SEO Expert? Feel free to contact me.
327 Comments
Regarding previous comment about "Fatal error: Call to undefined function esc_url() in /home/fruity/public_html/wp-content/plugins/seo-super-comments/seo-super-comments.php on line 235"... the problem went away when I deactivated and then reactivated the plugin.
No problem... fixed. Thanks for this great plugin. :)
I updated to version 0.6 (was OK with previous version) and now when I click on the author's name (to jump to the comment author's page), a blank page with this error occurs:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function esc_url() in /home/fruity/public_html/wp-content/plugins/seo-super-comments/seo-super-comments.php on line 235
Google seems to be dropping comment pages as fast as it is adding them at this stage, it has been hovering around 20. Possibly a duplicate content issue since many comments are short. I made some additional modifications to make the "recent comments by this poster" slightly more robust, which should give Google more material to work with.
I look forward to comparing the results with the sitemaps version later...
Reading the sitemaps plugin code and the docs, it's not clear if this handles the 50,000 entry specification of the sitemaps?
Hello again Vladimir,
Update -- good news and bad news -- regarding the issue of the faulty link in the items under "Comments by some_author".
Previously, the link was missing the "/comment-page-num/" part.
The good news is that at present, "/comment-page-num/" does appear.
The bad news is that the there is an extra "#comment-num" tagged on to the end of the link.
--HotForThisWorld
0.6 is pretty major update, added the option to specify friendly sites and XML sitemap plugin mod. Read the updated plugin page.
Just installed it on my website.. I have paged comments so I'm sure that I am SOOOO demoted on Google as a result, so this plugin will hopefully help being my ranking back up on Google.
Thanks Vladimir!
Marina
RT @ UV Phillipines:
Thanks for the explanation :-)
RT @UV
Is there a way you can post your updated plugin as an alternative for us to try / use?
I didn't change the plugin. I just changed the page template. I have the CommentLuv and Nofollow Free plugins installed. In the NOFF plugin, I told it to follow only comment text so that the CL links would get juice. So basically on the original page, the CL link gets juice and on the SCC page, the author link gets juice.
This is an amazing plugin, once you figure out what to do. I altered my page.php template and removed the comments and meta area and told the plugin to use that as a template.
Because I use the "Nofollow Free" and the CommentLuv plugins, I have it set so that on the original post, the CL link is followed. Then on the SSC page, only the author URL is followed. It works perfectly.
In less than 12 hours, more than 100 SSC pages have been indexed by Google. Good job, Vladimir!
By the way, my Filipino "apo" (my nephew's son) is named Vladimir.
Up to 39, seems to be speeding up. I adjusted up the comment title excerpting to 10 words, to try to grab more effective phases.
On smaller sites I can see the lack of a prominent url discouraging some (though whether people posting mainly to promote their site is good is another matter), but on larger sites the vast majority of commenters tend not to have sites so this is less of an issue. Giving them a mini-profile page is a much better idea. I also added Gravatar display to mine.
I think the duplicate content might be solved, depending on Google. If you have paginated comments, you could have Google only index 1 page and direct it to individual comments instead for the rest, storing/indexing comments on their own pages rather than on the post. This would require it to actually index them all. The duplication issue is probably overstated though.
Chris, author URLs are preserved on the new comment page.
This is an interesting experiment really, but if I replace all external author URLs with internal Seo comment pages instead, many commentors wouldn't be happy about their homepage/blog URL dissapearing. The original commetors URL should be moved at least somewhere else.
I'm also wondering if this isn't generating new problems with duplicate content?
I now have 20 pages indexed. Probably a set of sitemaps is really required to get it to gulp down thousands.
Quite interesting to see the progress Google is making - doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to the comments which get indexed.
Thanks Tim. I really appreciate it.
I've been using the Plugin for going on two weeks.
I had to remove the plugin from the Sidebars because the CID links point to the homepage and when you follow the link, it only displays the original pist and not he comment
I also haven't seen any indexing or traffic from Google. I don't think it' because Google needs more time to index the page because my pages are quickly indexed by google.
I would suggest two (2) improvements:
1. Instead of a dynamic user page, make it a more SEO Friendly Page like /profile/tim/1001 or /profile/1000 insead of something like ?CID1000
2. The pages need to be added to the SiteMap XML file because every other relevant page that is indexed is on the SiteMap xml file.
My two cents :-)
>Tim
That does not sound very promising. Maybe XML sitemaps are required (if you don't have one)?
On one domain I have 3,000 WP pages (all indexed) with 200,000 comments, 20,000 or so forum pages (probably all indexed), and another 170,000 pages indexed (out of 500,000+) on a subdomain. Since Google will go for low visibility forum pages on my domain, I would expect things linked off the WP pages would easily be indexed, and if they are not there might be a technical problem.
Possibly having articles with 100+ comments discourages the Google spider, or perhaps it interprets them as mere variations. Pagination might be one response, though perhaps time is also required.
I suppose only Vladimir so far knows the complete situation with this...
@Anonymous
You wrote, "Not sure at this stage how quickly Google will crawl the comment pages without any, it has only indexed one on the site in question so far, out of several hundred thousand."
I tested how many of these pages were crawled on the first 3 sites I started testing this one. They have 24015, 25923, and 7570 comments. Not one of these comment pages has shown up. But then again, it has only been 10 days
@James
Add
ini_set("memory_limit","80M");
to
/wp-includes/functions.php
Observation:
Sitemaps are supposed to be limited to 50,000 entries, which is quite possible to go over with a large number of posts and comments.
An index of discrete sitemaps is a solution, albeit a more involved one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitemap_index
Not sure at this stage how quickly Google will crawl the comment pages without any, it has only indexed one on the site in question so far, out of several hundred thousand.
I got this error after installing the plugin Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 67108864 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 311296 bytes) in /home/sitename/public_html/wp-includes/formatting.php on line 549. Any help? Though this might not be from the plugin because i have not activate it.Thanks
Very nice website I will study.
Thanks for the info, sounds like a great strategy.
You know it's funny. Every time I comment now, I want to put a good first keyword rich sentence at the beginning for long tail searches. When you see how the plugin works and what it does, I want to begin feeding google the words.
in response to @Anonymous who said "The whole "other posts by x" display fails to display at all on my setup", I too have this happening on one blog, but works just fine on a separate blog. Very weird.
I just found using the "Recent Comments" widget in the sidebar that the plugin gives an incorrect url.
http://yoursite.com/?cid=xxx
rather than the correct
http://yoursite.com/2009/07/24/sample-post/?cid=xxx
...or however you have permalinks setup.
TIM you have solved the problem with the link:
/?cid=id ?
A thought occurs...
How about an option to disable the in the case of registered users (potentially of a certain user level or upwards).
To put this in context, I'm planning some fairly extensive customisation of the user archive page, but this is 'overwritten' in comment author links by the plugin.
It'd be nice to have non-user's links generate the SEO page, but to have registered user's links go to the author page.
Or both, potentially? I might have a look at doing this manually with a template next week...
- Sorry, cross-posted this to the other post by mistake. Do feel free to delete it from there!