How to handle large numbers of comments?

[DougRoberts]

First the good news. One site that I've been working on has seen an increase in traffic from 2k/month to 80k!

As well as lots of visitors, the site is also getting lots of comments with one page getting more than 70 comments/day and showing no sign of a slow down! Approximately 3000 comments in total and growing!

What is the best approach for handling this? I'm not talking about the review/approval/response but just in the way these comments are presented on the website taking both seo and usability into account.

Does anyone have any particular recommendations? Options I've considered are:

• Just show the most recent x comments and ignore the rest. (Nobody is going to read 3000 comments!)
• Paginate comments (risk of duplicate content? Using Ajax could hide long-tail phrases in comments?)
• Show all comments (page load speed is suffering and this is likely to be causing problems for mobile visitors)

How do active comments on a page contribute to an article's freshness?

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

[DougRoberts]

Hi Paul. On many CMS's you'll find that the additional comments don't change the page's Last Modified http header or indeed the posted date in the body of the article. The comments are so far down the page that their perceived importance is going to be pretty low.

That said, active commends do show that there's significant visitor engagement which has got to be a good thing!

Interesting question about running a poll regarding the order of comments. I think however the order of the comments can work either way depending on the content/context.

For example, "news" type articles with a relatively short shelf-life tend to work better with comments in chronological order. There tend to be fewer comments (which dry-up as the article ages) so the ability to follow disussions in the comments is greatly improved.

For "ever-green" content it doesn't work so well. It can be jarring to come to the comments and be presented with one from 5 years ago!

The other SEO issues related to comments (especially out of the box on many CMS's) is the use of links (followed or no-followed).

If I've got a VERY popular page that's earning lots of real links, having all those links in the comments is going to be eating into the page equity that's going to be available to other pages I'm linking to on my own site. Paginating comments might be one way affect this?

I'm hoping to get some time to make the changes to the page in question - it'll be interesting to see what (if anything) changes!

Thanks!

[ThompsonPaul]

My understanding of the freshness aspect of the algorithm is that just adding or changing content on a page won't help it look more "recent" to the SE's. So new comments aren't really a benefit there.

As a user, I prefer comments that appear in chronological order, but I know many who prefer reverse chrono. That would be a really good question for an interactive poll on the site. If visitors are that engaged with comments, you'd likely get a large enough response to be statistically significant.

The big SEO issue I encounter from large numbers of comments is that all the extra content can dilute the original keyword focus of the page as you created it. Sure, there may be long-tail phrases introduced, but if they start to override the terms you were originally trying to focus on & rank for, things can get messy. Not suggesting dropping comments, obviously, but paginating them with a canonical back to the original post might at least partly help.

I'm also curious whether, if the comments all repeat the target key phrases to frequently, the page could look keyword stuffed. have no proof of that, unfortunately, just the suspicion.

And yea, whatever you decide will definitely have to address the page speed issue for visitors.

Paul

[DougRoberts]

Thanks Greg, I'd not considered "lazy loading", although while this is going to help with loading times I'm still a little concerned about page size! At least with user controlled pagination it's their choice to load more comments...

[DougRoberts]

Thanks EGOL. Totally understand your point about respecting visitors who take the time to leave a comment. What makes it harder is that effort is being spent answering questions/engaging visitors in the comments which gets lost is we arbitrarily cut off comments.

[EGOL]

Thank you!

I see that now.  That looks great.  Visitors can get to all comments but pageload time is saved.

[AndreVanKets]

EGOL, just to clarify...

With Lazy Loading and displaying only 20 comments, more comments get displayed when you scroll down, rather than having the page load all 3000 comments at once.

In other words, the comments wont be hidden, just tucked away and loaded as needed, when scrolling down the page.

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/lazy-loading-dynamic-function-loading

Greg

[EGOL]

I would paginate.

People who leave comments may come back a couple days later to see the comments left after theirs.  I think that it would be disrespectful of these dedicated visitors to show only some of the comments.

Take care of these people.  They are your most important asset.

[AndreVanKets]

I would go with your first point.

The more content on the page the better. Even better is user generated content!

Perhaps for user experience, display only 20 comments and wrap the wrest under "lazy loading" (suggestion from developer sitting next to me)

In other words, let the bots see all 3000 comments on the same page, but for user experience so the page doesn't take days to load, incorporate the "lazy loading" feature....

GREG