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Google indexes your comments
Vanessa offers some more good advice saying:
I know I may cause my SEO friends to gasp in horror when I say this, but if you have to balance priorities, youre probably right to relegate SEO to phase two of your product development plan. However, if you do that, theres definitely one thing you need to factor in to phase one, and thats the ability to implement SEO later. [more...]
Vanessa refers to Danny Sullivan (I had a quick chat with him not long ago) as an example, his Sphinn uses Ajax for comments so search engines can not get at all the user generated content.
Except that the comments on Sphinn are in Ajax, and with Javascript turned off, theyre invisible. Which means all of that great user-generated content is also invisible to search engines. -Vanessa Fox
Who knows, maybe Danny believes “comments” are much too noisy?
Did you know that this blog gets most of it’s traffic from Google for phrases about “SEO” made in the comment area? In other words, if people are offering their input, that conversation in algorithms is often of more value than the original post, hint hint! ;)
Important points:
- Relegate SEO to phase two but make sure you have your template (CMS, static site, forum, whatever…) in order.
- Do not overlook the value of comments, Google indexes your comments (increasing your traffic and value).
Similar Post:
- How blog comments influence search engine rankings
- Removing the nofollow tags from comments
- Reward commenters with sitewide link credits
August 27th, 2007 at 8:36 pm
None of this comes as a big shock to me. I’m often found under phrases that people entered in (e.g. Vicotin…now you’ll rank for it too!) in my comments.
And yes, “Vicotin” is misspelled on purpose.
Sphinn using AJAX for comments (I never got past the first page because even that was full of spam) is no surprise, either. You build a site that caters to the blackhats, you let anyone submit anything, you’d better do something to block the SEO effects.
August 28th, 2007 at 5:06 am
Adam - The last time I was ranking for that type of stuff is when I got hacked, I would check to see if you have any traffic going to a subdirectory that you didn’t create and links coming in from spammy Blogger accounts. In other news, remember when this happened to me? It has taken this long to clean up the mess, this place is still screwed in algorithms.
Yes, Sphinn has “marketers” all boxed in competing for attention, it is actually the place Google wants them. ;)
August 28th, 2007 at 10:16 pm
No, it was legit. Someone posted a comment and misspelled the word.