User comments with page content or as a separate page?

[Peter264]

With the latest Google updates in both cracking down on useless pages and concentrating on high quality content, would it be beneficial to include user posted comments on the same page as the content or a separate page? Having a separate page with enough comments on it would he worth warranting, especially as extra pages add extra pagerank but would it be better to include them with the original article/post? Your ideas and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

[zeepartner]

actually, on second thoughts I think the view-all page solution with rel=canonical (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html) might be the smarter choice.

[zeepartner]

Hi Peter

That's actually a pretty good idea, I like it!

Only thing I'm not sure about: If we do paginate, the product description should still stay on top of the page, while only the comments below change. That way we get duplicate content, and the paginated pages with the additional comments would not be ranking well anyhow, I guess. So using rel=next/prev and rel=canonical might be the right choice, even if that way, only the first page with comments will be able to rank?

[Peter264]

After posting this topic, we found that including all of the comments on the same page helped with long tail queries and alike. We haven't implemented pagination with the comments though, I think the most we have on one page is around 120 reasonably lengthy comments. I would add pagination for anything longer than that - you could use the REL=next and REL=previous tags on these pages to ensure that the engines group the pages together so they know they are the same piece of content. I hope this helps! Let us know what you decide.

[zeepartner]

I'm wondering about the same thing. Would you actually limit the amount of user comments on a page? And if so, would you place the surplus comments on an extra page?

[connectiveWeb]

You will want the comments on the same page as the actual content for sure. The UGC on the main page will help keep it fresh as well as being another possible reason for people to link to it. Asking a user to browse to a second page would make it that less likely they would actually comment as well. Keeping it simple would be best. It's kind of the same idea as to why you would want to have your blog on the same sub domain as your main site as in the newest whiteboard Friday.

[EGOL]

Comments on a separate page is a PITA.

**....especially as extra pages add extra pagerank...  **  Extra pages have nothing to do with adding pagerank.   In fact the more pages you have the less pagerank any single page on your site has.