UGC Comments - Ditch them?
-
Site: bussongs.com
I have a fairly successful (400k visits/month, 1.2m PV/month) site which features a directory of lyrics-style content. The bulk of the content is not unique and exists in many places across the web.
I figured adding commenting would help add more bulk to each page and give some long-tail on-page KWs. The comments are non-AJAX and Google is crawling the information. There's 10k comments across the site.
I have some automated filters to remove profanity and junk but otherwise comments are published in real time. Because of the niche I target, the quality of spelling/grammar is very low. I don't have any pagination at the moment so some pages are now quite long and the quantity of UGC content is considerably larger than the main content of the page.
Traffic went down post-Panda and has picked up slowly over time - almost back at normal levels. But I feel I could better manage comments and that they do have an impact on SEO.
Do these comments have value? Should I use AJAX to stop crawling? Implement pagination to limit page length? Use plus/minus ranking to give prominence to the better comments?
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts. Thanks!
-
Those comments definitely have value since it's some of your only unique content. There will likely be lots of junk comments, but every few will be decent comments with good references to the songs.
Since your lyrics are for things like kids songs, or christmas songs, and you have a way more attractive theme than most lyrics websites, I could see that earning you some decent comments that people wouldn't post on a junky looking site.
Regarding Pagination / AJAX Alternatives:
AJAX would look nice if you can find a good SEO-friendly version, but that sounds like lots of work with questionable SEO value to me.
How about just loading all comments in a div that has a set height and overflow:auto; in use, and apply some custom formatting to the scrollbar appearance using javascript or jquery?
- http://www.net-kit.com/jquery-custom-scrollbar-plugins/
- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1256258/div-scrollbar-any-way-to-style-it
- http://www.n-son.com/scripts/jsScrolling/jsScroller.html
Regarding Spell Checking:
It looks like your whole site is PHP. If you're handy with coding your own PHP, you could quickly borrow the code from a spellchecker such as a wordpress plugin, use it on your comment forms, and make it automatically apply that to the users comment. Then, give the user a pop up window after they click submit that says "Your comment has been spell-checked, click here to edit any of our changes" so that users can override it.
It requires some extra effort upfront on your part, but could result in some very high quality content for the niche.
Add Social Buttons:
I would get Like / Tweet / +1 buttons up on your site, I imagine that will be a good indicator that you're not a junk site. You have share, but these easier-to-click buttons get a way higher usage rate IMO.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What is the best comments system / plugin for websites
Hi, What is the best comments system / plugin for websites that not harm seo Thanks Roy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadut0 -
Is Paging Comments SEO Friendly? Implications?
So glad to be here. Just amazed to see so many discussions over here. I had a quick query. One of our my blog has more than 500 comments on almost 50+ posts (and in some posts, it's even 1000+ comments). This impacts the load time as well as the experience on mobile. So, wanted to understand if I enable pagination of comments, is it SEO friendly. Does it negatively impacts SEO? I do not want to take the route of migrating to Disqus, FB comments, etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | flmgo820 -
Pros & Cons Of Closing Forum Discussions To New Comments
I work with a site that gets lots of members and conversions from its specialty interest community forum out of organic search. The site has been around for a number of years and still has many forum pages that do well in search that are 5+ years old. Some of these discussions may have dozens of comments and a few have thousand words. The option has been floated to end accepting new comments on specific discussions at some point. I can see the negatives, such as folks coming out of search and wanting to register to comment, but not be able to... if we closed the discussion to new comments. I've always assumed that new comments may freshen up a page a little organic search-wise, but honestly don't know how much that matters. Are there any good reasons to close a discussion to new comments? Related question, what do you think is the optimum qty of unique text before paginating? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945011 -
If UGC on my site also exists elsewhere, is that bad? How should I properly handle it?
I work for a reviews site, and some of the reviews that get published on our website also get published on other reviews websites. It's exact duplicate content -- all user generated. The reviews themselves are all no-indexed; followed, and the pages where they live are only manually indexed if the reviews aren't duplicate. We leave all pages with reviews that live elsewhere on the web nofollowed. Is this how we should properly handle it? Or would it be OK to follow these pages regardless of the fact that technically, there's exact duplicate UGC elsewhere?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dunklea0 -
Nofollow links & nofollow blog comments - Should I remove
Hello, One of my website has quite a lot (~1000) nofollow blog comment links. Is it worth getting them removed if they are nofollow, could they be dragging the metric of my website down. Does anyone have any experience of this? The site only has about 5 follow links, something seems to be dragging the domain metrics down. Thanks Rob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomfifteen0 -
Any experience with using programs to create UGC pages?
We have a new client (a mobile app) who created a program to create thousands of pages of "unique, user-generated content" for their website. An example: A person in the forum in app asks a question, and people respond. The client's program then compiles the question and responses into a unique, auto-generated page for the website. (I don't think the app is utilizing deep linking -- though I was going to recommend it -- so the app content is not indexed by search engines yet.) The pages are already created -- they are just not live on the site yet. I'm very skeptical. But the client says it's similar to what Stack Overflow does (or something like that). Basic example. Say that a question for which the client wants to rank is, "What Are the Symptoms of Cancer?" I'd think that a quality, human-created, referenced, well-written, authoritative page would obviously rank more highly than a UGC page based on a forum discussion on that topic. But of course, doing that for hundreds of questions is costly and hard to scale -- both of which are concerns of the client (a startup with little money). Has anyone had any experience in this? It's the first time I've tackled such an issue. Thanks in advance for any thoughts!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamuelScott0 -
Blog comments - backlinks - question
Hi, I see that many good websites have backlinks from very good blogs/sites which are relative. What I noticed that everyone use their real name or generic name in comments. They do not use the keyword for the name. So later they get backlinks with anchor text of their names... So, my question is this good technique ? Do I have any benefits from these backlinks for my website ? With such a technique, whether it is enough just to leave your real name or may I periodically put the keyword for the name ? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ivek990 -
Should I put rel=publisher on UGC?
My website has a main section that we call expert content and write for. We also have a community subdomain which is all user generated. We are a pretty big brand and I am wondering should the rel publisher tag just be for the www expert content, or should we also use it on the community UGC even though we don't directly write that?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarloSchneider1