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
Thanks for this plug-in. I've been using it for quite sometime now though I'm yet to notice any traffic soike yet. I was wondering if your XML sitemaps plugin modded files which work for future versions of XML sitemaps plugin. Hope to hear from you soon.
Thanks a lot
Thanks for the article, very helpful. I will study it.
I installed this on my blog and have noticed that the comment pages which are created contain a link rel="canonical" tag which points back to the article page.
Surely this tag will prevent Google from indexing the comment page and therefore renders the whole thing useless? (Don't get me wrong I LOVE the idea, I think it just needs tweaking!)
Your thoughts?
I found out that a plugin I was using called "All In One Seo" was automatically adding the rel="canonical" tag (there's an option in the plugin to disable). I think the tag prevented Google from indexing the comments pages (as you pointed out). When I disabled the rel="canonical"... then FINALLY, Google started indexing the pages. Previously, I had been using the plugin for 1 month and only 12 pages got indexed. Now (after disabling canonical), 300+ pages have been indexed.
But now, the new WordPress 2.9 automatically enables rel="canonical" (built-in)... so now I think the SEO Super Comments plugin might no longer be compatible with WordPress? It might now work now unless you modify some WordPress core files...
I just set this up on my new blog. I'm wondering if it van be used on wordpress pages where comments are allowed.
My theme comes with the single.php for posts and pagetemplate.php for pages.
Should I just go into the edit option of the pluign and change it from single.php to pagetemplate.php?
Thanks for any help!
One month ago I added Seo Super Comment to my blog http://www.weirdworm.com/ and google didn't index any comments yet. So I checked my nofollow settings I found possible problem (link to comment cid page was nofollow) and I corrected it. Now, after 3 days, google still didn't index any comments, and believe me Weird Worm is very fast in indexing...
Can anyone help me with this?
Thank you in advance!
I think I will remove this plugin because of same issue.
Nice information! You're a seo expert! I gonna try your plugin!
Oh and one more modification I made is unhook SEOSuperComments_author_link and created a new hook to get_comment_link, instead.
For example, if I were using your ?cid=999 structure (I'm not), I would have added these lines to my functions.php:
// [Note: Requires WordPress 2.7+]
add_filter("get_comment_link", "ssc_get_comment_link");
function ssc_get_comment_link($comment_link) {
if (isset($SEOSuperComments))
return str_replace("#comment-", "?cid=", $comment_link);
return $comment_link;
}
This works flawlessly as long as the theme uses get_comment_link(), comment_link() or wp_list_comments(). All your permalink#comment-999 references will disappear. The best part is that it also changes the comment permalinks in the comments RSS feed -- your comment feed subscribers will think they subscribed to a whole new blog.
I hope this answers JohnF's question.
I didn't like the "blog.us/post-slug?cid=999" format, and preferred "blog.us/comment/999", so I changed the plugin in two places (and one change in sitemaps-core.php) and added the following to my .htaccess.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule comment/([0-9]+) comment?cid=$1
(Before anyone of you try this, make sure you have no post slug that begins with the word "comment". Or change the second "comment" word to something you DON'T have.)
This comment permalink structure matched great with my post permalink structure which is blog.us/999 . I like my permalinks short.
I would have loved to change the permalinks in my comments feed to this one, but unfortunately, the current WordPress version has no hooks in comment_link() or get_comment_link().
This is a quick and dirty hack, though. Once I get around to it, I will write a patch to this plugin that uses WordPress's WP_Rewrite object. I hope this helps someone. Thanks for sharing this plugin.
Oops I was looking at an old version of WP source code. WordPress 2.7 above does have the "get_comment_link" filter.
Cool idea for a plugin, installed on http://www.45-year-old-millionaire.co.uk/ (as a test, doesn't have many comments) that's running WP 2.8.5 and got it working, but not in an automated way.
It's creating the individual comment pages, but there was no links from the single blog post page the comment is related to because my theme lacked the function:
comment_author_link
Also all comments was showing on the single comment pages (as if it was a single blog post) suggesting the default options aren't working correctly with my theme.
I run with a highly customized SEO theme, (so not surprised there are issues, my themes title elements for example are very complex). As you know nofollow is now anti SEO, so I've converted the author links into form post button 'links' (looks like text links through CSS, but are forms which are ignored by Google = no wasted link benefit).
I edited the plugin and my themes code to get something I'm semi happy with: http://www.45-year-old-millionaire.co.uk/what-is-twitter-marketing.html?cid=4848
Replaced on single posts the comment permalink (format url#comment-id links) with the cid links (couldn't get the cid links to show as I wanted them with keyword rich anchor text).
Created a new single.php template page and removed features not wanted (comments section for example).
Edited the plugin code to:
Increase the number of words used as a title from 8 to 12 (considering adding the main post title to the title as well, but might make it too long).
Removed the "Also commented code", wanted one full comment per page to reduce duplicate content.
Edited the list of comments by the same author so rather than showing the full comment it shows an excerpt (24 words) so the comment pages by the same author are more unique (less duplicate content).
Still have to edit my header as the codes not compatible with this plugin and the comments title element isn't showing.
Also want to have it so only comments with X number of words or characters are linked to from the single post pages. I don't want comment pages with less than say 100 words linked to, because it's a waste of link benefit.
Hoping you incorporate some of these ideas into the next version so I have less work upgrading :)
If I get it working as I want it will be using it on sites with thousands of comments to see if it increases traffic. Will just need commenter's to think SEO when they type the first 12 words now :-)
On a not so related note are you concerned at the nofollow tag on your Reply to comment links? This post for example has created over 160 nofollow links (one for each comment) on your site that delete link benefit!! I was concerned so removed the nofollow code from the core WordPress file, tried to get WordPress development team to make a change, but fell on deaf ears! I lack the skills to do that at theme level/plugin level hint, hint.
David Law
Hi Vladimir,
I understand the basic concept of the plugin. It's a very interesting idea. Thanks for taking the time to share it with us. However, I know I'm not alone in still being confused about the implementation of this idea in your plugin.
When the plugin is installed, it creates an author link to what appears to the user to be a new page. But, in reality, it's just a parametrized version of the same page by using the ?cid URL parameter. In addition, in one of the earlier examples you gave (low-bounce-rate-wordpress-themes?cid=13683), I looked at the source code and it used a canonical tag () that tells Google that the preferred version of this page as something other than the current page.
Now, I'm getting confused for several reasons.
(1) From Google's point of view, how are all of the "pages" seen as unique from a URL point of view since we know that Google correctly recognizes URL parameters for what they are (parameters of the same base URL) and merges all of the variations into one listing? From a search engine indexing point of view I just don't see where the extra pages are coming from since they all get merged. Furthermore, I know that a lot of people, including myself, have set up Google Analytics to ignore any query strings using the "? mark and merge any data with that of the base URL.
(2) According to Matt Cutts, the canonical statement acts in a very similar way to a 301 redirect. So, in your example, the canonical statement is basically telling Google that your preferred version of all of these extra "pages" is that of your home page. Again, from an indexing point of view, where are the unique URL's coming from because I don't see them--all I see is page variations of the same URL?
No matter how I look at it, all I see is variations of the same URL via the use of a URL parameter called cid. A user will see this as a unique page, but Google will see that it's not a unique URL which is what really matters. What I don't see is any increase in the number of unique URL's that would be uniquely indexed in Google.
So, that's a basic explanation of my confusion. I hope it made sense to everyone.
Vladimir, I'd love a response from you on this one as I am really curious what I'm missing here. Perhaps the key lies in the method Google uses to merge all of these pages variations into one URL with a multitude of Title tags and H1 headers such that the effect is the same as though one did indeed have unique URL's for all of these page variations.
Regards.
Hi Jarrod
The canonical tag came from the theme actually and not from the plugin, I have fixed that, nice find.
I have a blog and using this plugins, i have currently enabled do follow, will this have negative impact on seo ranking ?
no, do-follow does not have negative implications with this plugin.
I've been using this for a while now, and whilst I get 5 to 20 comments per page, my traffic from the ?cid pages is only between 0.05% and 0.9% of overall traffic.
That's not your fault, just saying that the results are always going to vary from one site to another.
What I'm wondering, is if anyone has information on how much CPU/queries it takes to have this plugin installed? I need to de-tune my shared host usage a bit at the moment, and whilst I like SEO Comments out of principal, the traffic I get is low, so if it's CPU usage is high I may disable it.
Well it is quite fascinating still that you can increase the traffic by almost 1% by something that costs you no money.
Hi,
how can i see a page created by the plugin once installed ?
i've also modified sitemap files but pages created don't appear. Can you help me ? Ty
Hi,
On my website I don't require visitors to use an email address when they comment. This means that all users who leave a comment without an email address are being grouped together by SEO Super Comments which is wrong.
How do I modify the code to either check for the username and IP combination of the commenter (which won't always work) or just the username (which is even less reliable). So, that users who don't give an email address aren't associated by this plugin.
Thanks! :)
Very very interesting plugin, i'm going to install and check it out. Thank you!
Once this plugin is installed, how can I tell whether it is working? I'm using WP 2.8.4 and Super Comments 0.6.4. I've cleared the blog cache, but the comments are the same as before, with no links to separate pages.
It takes a little while ... I don't know why ... Changes appeared on my site a day later ...
Okay, thanks for the reply. I was going to wait a day or two before removing the plugin. If this inaction is followed by expected behavior, I can be patient.
Please read my comment below for the the unexpected behaviour I experienced ... I've disabled the plugin to eliminate 404 errors coming up till this is fixed ... It should be an easy edit in the code I expect ...
I wasn't getting any 404s or anything. The plugin just didn't seem to do anything. I've decided to remove it.
In my theme, the blog post is a link pointing to it's own URL ... This plugin works great, but when it picks up the first few words of the comment to create a new heading for the page, the heading link does not form correctly ... Great plugin ... Love it !
I have implemented the plugin in my blog, but I'm getting a lot of duplicate title tags.
please add in the plugin function like
if (function_exists(‘seo_comments’)) {
} else {
}
Because the theme is very ugly with the plugin :( sorry for my english
I have a small group of blogs and I would like to be able to link them together through comments on each blog. When I add my sites to the whitelist to be dofollowed it only works if you just use the internet address like http://www.adomain.com.
If you try to use anchor text it adds the nofollow even to the whitelisted sites. In fact, it even does it to me as the admin when I try to internal link pages using anchor text on the blog I am logged in as admin for at the time.
Am I doing something wrong or is there a way for me to fix it so I can use anchor text on white listed sites and keep them from being nofollowed?
Thanks in advance for the help!
Love the plug-in
Chuck
We have very few pages but hundreds of comments per page, and this plugin seems to provide a way for google to index them. Thank you.
One question: after rebuilding the sitemap using the updated sitemap plugin, and submitting it to google webmaster tools, I get "4000 URLs submitted", but only "15 indexed". Is this expected? Or is google ignoring all the /?cid and not really indexing each comment?
Google is slow to show changes in webmaster tools but you can used site: command on google.com to watch the index change.
Well, after 3 weeks I don't think it's going to happen. I've tried both webmaster tools and the site: command.
For some reason, it's still merging all the comments URLs for an article into one, just like if the "/?cid" was being dropped from each comment URL.
Validmir: Trying to understand how Google deals with the new links, I did site: for your site, but did not find any "/?cid" in the 431 results. Is your plugin active here? Or am I looking for the wrong thing? Thanks.
Vladimir, thank you for an excellent plugin. I use it on all of my blogs now, including my latest multi-author blog, "Post Your Own Articles". All of the "CID" pages are being indexed on all of them (so I don't know why it's affecting others differently) and I can't think of any way it could be better.
Have you been able to monitor change in traffic?
RT, do you mind sharing your website address?
It hasn't made a negligible dent in search traffic, but the pageviews have increased, possibly from curiosity.
Aldo, http://www.untwistedvortex.com is one of 5 blogs I'm using it on.
I have another question not related to SEO Super Comments. I see this menu on right side bar. With "Jump to: hide,Top of page,Comments, Comment form". Is this a plugin or something you built which is only used here. Thanks
Hi John
It's not a plugin it's a feature built into the theme.
Thanks for the excellent plug in. It does give visibility to the commentators and a preview of their earlier comments.
I have a question. Currently the link for the respective comment under the post appears like this. Coment URL >>> post name /#comment-120. This is the standard code in the theme to display link for the comment.
How do I change this to show the seo super comments page created. I mean how can I change the url in the comment for the respective comment to >>> post name /?cid=120 as in this example.
Appreciate your help and Thank you.
well, it's risky i think, but interesting