Presenting SEO Super Comments Concept

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:

1. Google seems to have liked it very much. It ’swallowed’ around 1,500 comment pages in the first day (gulp!)
2. 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)

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.

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.

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