The Stallion version of the SEO Super Comments WordPress Plugin is built directly into the Stallion Responsive Theme and the Stallion WordPress SEO theme (doesn’t need installing like a WordPress Plugin) and is a highly modified version of the Comments WordPress SEO Plugin which is an updated version of the Prelovac SEO Super Comments WordPress Plugin (phew, that was a lot of plugin explanations). It’s easily activated under the “Stallion Theme” >> “Advanced SEO Options” page. No other WordPress theme has the set of WordPress SEO features described below. Prelovac SEO Super Comments WordPress SEO Plugin The original Prelovac SEO Super Comments WordPress SEO Plugin (no feature updates for years) turns all WordPress comments into WordPress post like pages (they […]
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WordPress News Plugins
Stallions super comments might help if there is an active community cranking out comments that create relevant pages about a current buzz.
I did have a news plugin one of my sites and google seemed to like it but took it off as I was afraid it might be too spammy.
# https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-news/ Olav Kolbu creates a few of these. I allowed descriptions to appear in the widget, then Google picked it up and I ranked on a number of SERP for various term. But I pulled the plugin as I do not know if Google would like that. Maybe if it was an original news source like Reuters, I wonder if this can be tweeked in anyway to have some SEO value that is not spammy?
However from my early reading of this Google is not looking for old pages updated but new pages created, which brings me back to super comments and drawing more people into the conversation, whatever that might be for the day.
WordPress News Plugins
Google News WordPress Plugin and Fresh Content
Does Google Prefer Fresh Content? is an article I wrote a while back about fresh content.
Didn’t install the Google News plugin, but have seen similar.
I’d be very careful using this type of WordPress plugin on important websites. The content is duplicate content (someone elses content) and if the content is spiderable you’ll be wasting link benefit via links to the news items.
To make this sort of concept worthwhile you’d have to create posts or pages aimed at various news worthy SERPs. Cheap Mortgages for example, create a post called Cheap Mortgages, add a Google news feed for cheap mortgages (10 items say) and every time Google news updates your post updates.
SEO Issues
Wasting link benefit : probably easy to solve using the Stallion link cloaking script, edit the plugin to use the Stallion link cloaking code rather than standard links, if the links are nofollow by the plugin Stallion can convert them to cloaked links without having to even edit the script (Stallion Advanced SEO feature).
Duplicate content : This is why you don’t use this technique on important websites. The content is copied from Google News and is duplicate. Although it’s not as bad as an autoblog it’s definitely in that greyhat SEO area. If you have a relatively large site and add a few relevant pages with Google news feeds that auto update you’ll probably be fine. Build a website with only these types of pages and you are pushing it.
Not exactly the same, but a similar site (PR3 56,000 pages indexed in Google). The site is almost all Google news feeds, it’s not single pages that auto update, it’s pulled the individual news items into posts. Over the past month it’s received just over 250 visitors, clearly penalized.
I use a plugin I’m calling “Stallion Fresh Content WordPress SEO Plugin” that’s based on an old plugin with my major updates. This plugin randomly reposts your old posts as fresh content to the top page of archives (home, categories, tags) so it appears the site is updated frequently. You set the time for a ‘new’ post in minutes and when a visitors hits your site after that period a post is randomly selected and given the current date/time. I’m using it on quite a few sites that have timeless content and I don’t update often.
When I get the time plan to add the Fresh Content WordPress SEO Plugin to the WordPress repository, need to write the readme files etc…
Anyway, this plugin will have a similar impact to updating your site on a regular basis because all the archive pages will update regularly and on posts and pages the sidebar widget Recent Posts will change.
I don’t use the plugin for SEO gain from fresh content per se because in my experience it’s not the fresh content in itself that results in better rankings (see the article Does Google Prefer Fresh Content link above) I use it because it helps with spidering, changes the RSS feed content regularly (great for large sites like the my recipe site and works with the Copyfeed plugin (free from WordPress SEO Plugins) in generating links from sites that scrape RSS feeds :-)) and it makes a site with timeless content appear regularly updated.
I was going to add it to the Stallion theme, but you can’t use it if your permalinks structure uses dates, when the posts date is updated the permalink changes and this results in 404 errors. So will be released as a stand-alone plugin.
David
Google News WordPress Plugin and Fresh Content
WordPress SEO Comments Traffic
The super comments plugin, a year or so later has been working and getting more traffic to my site by creating landing pages. I pay attention to my commentators and try to maintain a standard of comments I publish as poor grammar and low quality comments I do not approve. I use the standard: ‘is this page useful to the reader’.
My question is do you think 400 characters is too short a criteria to create a super comment. You know Google is focusing on low quality pages as a ranking factor. I question is a 400 character page of truly unique content has any value?
Further, what if today I changed it to 2000 characters from 400 lets say, would that mean for example a 500 character super comment that exists today would no longer be super comment page? and the number of pages would decrease? I think so. That is not a bad thing. I deleted all my tag pages and therefore, my total number of index pages by Google decreased and nothing bad happened.
So super comments is brilliant and works and is saving me the pain of creating that forum I always talked about. It is just about the settings of super comments?
I guess I am asking is the default too low for optimal SEO in 2012? What do you think or feel about this?
WordPress SEO Comments Traffic
Stallion SEO Super Comments Plugin Options
The original Prevolac SEO Super Comments plugin I got the starting code from for the Stallion SEO Super Comments Plugin “creates” (not really creates as it’s all database based) an SEO Super Comment for every comment even a single word comment!
This was an awful idea for the sorts of reasons you’ve touched on which is why before I used it on a live site I added the character count so only reasonably sized comments are generating the links to the SEO Super Comments pages. The original functionality of “creating” an SEO Super Comments page for every comment is still part of Stallion SEO Super Comments, what the character limit controls is whether the link to the Super Comments page is shown at the bottom of the comment or not: so the super comments page is there all the time, but is only linked to when the character limit is met. If there’s no links Google etc… can’t find them. It’s equivalent to the WordPress search function, you can search a WordPress site for any word you like and if you link to the URL loaded for example WordPress SEO Consultant) Google will index it (the WordPress SEO Consultant search will be indexed now). As long as no one links to the search results they won’t be indexed.
This means if you have the character limit set to 400, Google etc… indexes the site and say indexed all 200 SEO Super Comments pages with 400+ characters. You change the character limit to 1,000 when Google reindexes the site the links to any Super Comments below 1,000 characters will be gone, but the pages will still exist (they can still be loaded). I would anticipate long term Google would remove most of them because of a lack of ways to find them naturally**.
** If external sites have linked to them, scraped your site or something that replicates the links they might remain indexed long term.
The number of characters to use is a difficult one. Most comments are small, so to benefit from the Stallion SEO Super Comments pages you can’t set it too high and if you set it too low the SEO quality of the pages it links to is debatable.
On the Super Comments pages I’ve attempted to automatically add more ‘unique’ content:
Thumbnail from the original post.
More comments by the same author which is an excerpt from the same authors other comments.
Support for the output of the Stallion Related Posts WordPress SEO Plugin from WordPress SEO Plugins. Specifically adds the related posts output for the original post.
So though 400 characters may sound small when you take the extra content into account it can add up.
A good SEO test would be too take a snapshot of how much traffic your indexed Super Comments pages are generating in say a month and check how many characters they have. If you find 90% of the traffic comes from comments with at least 1,000 characters there’s an argument for increasing the limit: set to 900 and check again a few months later to see if traffic overall has changed and if traffic to super comments pages has changed overall.
David
Stallion SEO Super Comments Plugin Options
How to get WordPress Hovercards?
Is there a way to get Hovercards working with Stallion? I think the issue might come from the comment template. I have given up on an ‘all in one solution’ for socializing WP, instead an looking for incremental ways to improve the social aspect of my blog via the comment system, like using Hovercards.
Hovercards WordPress Social Networking
Pursuant to our conversation ad nauseum on making Stallion social, I think if this one feature could work, I could make a social site based on Stallion by simply changing the comments to an area that people might advertise their profile or interest in others. Hovercards do not create a link to Gravatar in an SEO sense and people do have the ability to have a personal profile page off site that does not interfere with SEO>
I looked at the dating profile plugin out there and it is just OK.
I have no ideas if the site I am building will work but Hovercards working would help.
Hovercards WordPress Social Networking
Adding Gravatar Hovercards to a WordPress Theme
Not used Gravatar Hovercards before, so not looked into how to implement them in detail.
Tried a couple of plugins on a test site running Stallion, no joy. Took a look at what the plugins output and looks like just a reference to javascript.
Tried a Gravatar Hovercard plugin with the TwentyEleven theme and the TwentyTen theme and it didn’t work, so looks like the two plugins I found first are broken (first two listed in Google for the “Gravatar Hovercards WordPress” search).
Found a plugin called Extended Gravatar v.06 which works in TwentyTen. Tested on Stallion v7 and didn’t work in the comments area, but did work on the author biography box and if I posted a Gravatar image link within a post. Interesting feature with the Extended Gravatar plugin, looks like it can be set to email your commenter’s an invitation to join Gravatar if they don’t already have a Gravatar image etc… which might fit in well with your plans.
Suspected the issue would be the Gravatar SEO code I use in Stallion 7 that turns the Gravatar image links (which are potentially SEO damaging) into CSS based background images (which are SEO neutral). Changed the code to what other WordPress themes use and it worked.
I’ve left the original Gravatar code within Stallion, so easy to revert it back.
Edit comments-reply-functions.php
Change
comment_author_email; $size = 60; $rating = get_option('avatar_rating'); $gravtype = get_option('avatar_default'); $default = urlencode( 'http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/ad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536?s=' . $size ); if ($gravtype=='mystery') $grav_url = 'http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/'. md5( strtolower( trim( $email ) ) ). '?s=' . $size . '&r=' . $rating . '&d=' . $default; elseif ($gravtype=='blank') $grav_url = "/wp-includes/images/blank.gif"; else $grav_url = "http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/" . md5( strtolower( trim( $email ) ) ) . "?s=" . $size ."&d=" . $gravtype ."&r=". $rating; ?> <div class="gravatars" style="background: url()"></div>to
That should get you on the right track.
With minimal testing the Gravtar Hovercards were temperamental in Stallion, though this was a Localhost test site with various plugins running that look for code errors etc… and load a lot of javascript and other stuff that can get in the way.
If you get something working that you think would extend Stallion would consider adding the plugin to Stallion and add an option to use the original Gravatar code above or I might be able to find a way to have it work with the current Stallion SEO safe Gravatar code.
Do like the idea if commenter’s will use it.
David
Adding Gravatar Hovercards to a WordPress Theme
Jetpack Gravatar Hovercards
I do think Hovercards are a nice feature if it is made SEO. The Hovercard I was using was the one from Jetpack. It does not matter, but I figure the official WP hovercard plugin in Jetpack would might be the best as they keep it up to date and working.
I think I can get commenters to use it I design my site that way (I will show you if I can get it all working how it looks). I will give them some Gravatar invitations and show them examples.
As mentioned I have experimented with larger social networking plugins and they are good and work with Stallion, but they are huge, adding complexity and tables to the database and not as SEO friendly, as pure Stallion alone.
Hovercards is much more lite weight, and I suspect people will check out someone’s Gravatar more than they would ‘register’ and go to a profile page.
If you actually click on a person’s Gravatar link it opens a new page, while your website remains open in the background, so it does not affect time on site, except in a positive way (if that is a factor).
Thank you for looking into this an replying in detail about Hovercards, check out the JetPack one by the way.
Jetpack Gravatar Hovercards
Gravatar Hovercards do Work with your Fix
I guess the question is if I have a whole site with 100s or 1000s of these image links via Gravatar will this hurt SEO.
The alternative would be to use something like Jonathan Kemp profile pages. However, I suspect Gravatars are easier. I am always concerned about SEO of course.
Again that premium Dating site plugin out there is nothing more than a basic search function on some profile pages.
Gravatar Hovercards do Work with your Fix
SEO Value of WordPress Gravatar Images
Standard WordPress themes Gravatar code are standard image code with a blank alt text attribute. Images with this format used by all WordPress themes I’ve seen except Stallion have SEO value when used correctly, in particular the alt text is important as are the images file names.
The best code would be filename “keyword-phrase.jpg” and alt=”Keyword Phrase”.
With the standard Gravatar image code the filenames are awful and the alt text is non-existent (blank alt attributes) and the Gravatar images are hosted off site which are all potential SEO negatives.
The above information is SEO fact, below is SEO theory.
I don’t have SEO test data on this, but it seems commonsense SEO having dozens of images linked off site with no alt text and awful filenames is at best SEO neutral and more likely SEO negative.
I work on the belief all SEO factors have a finite value (lets call it SEO points) shared over elements that use that SEO factor. I assume the SEO value of having images on a page is shared over all the images that are readable by search engines. If there’s 100 SEO points (arbitrary figure) available for all image filenames and a page has 10 images, each image would ‘use’ 10 SEO points, if there’s 100 images each would ‘use’ 1 SEO point.
Simple SEO concept to work with.
If you have a page with 10 images within the post and a further 90 Gravatar images, you can see theoretically 90% of your image filename SEO points are wasted on Gravatar images.
It’s SEO fact images that are served via CSS as background images are SEO neutral (no value eitherway, won’t ‘use’ our SEO points), which is why I added the custom Gravatar code to Stallion, the output of which is.
background: url("http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/2949679560e858721221c9e0f215f991?s=60&d=identicon&r=G") repeat scroll 0% 0% transparent;"This Gravatar image output is definitely SEO neutral, the default Gravatar output is probably SEO damaging. I personally wouldn’t add hundreds of Gravatar images with standard image code if I could avoid it. I like the idea of the Gravatar Hovercards so plan to see if I can adapt a Gravatar plugin to use the background Gravatar images.
I’m currently turning Stallion into a framework theme so child themes will work with Stallion. Child themes are a really cool concept, rather than editing the main theme files you create a folder like /stallion-seo-theme-child/ reference the folder to the Stallion theme and add to that folder the files you’ve edited.
I’m finding it a royal pain updating some of my sites when I update Stallion because I tend to have custom template files and images so can’t use the built in WordPress theme updater (it deletes the current themes folder) as I’d loose the customizations (have to reupload via FTP, so might as well use FTP to update everything). When Stallion is a framework theme all my customizations will go into a child theme folder and updates will all be via the theme updater saving a lot of hassle using FTP. Will also open the possibility of other theme developers creating and selling Stallion child themes.
David
SEO Value of WordPress Gravatar Images
SEO Gravatar Hovercard Plugin
Both the SEO Gravatar hovercard plugin and the sub or child themes would be very welcomed updates.
The Gravatar functionality is a nice from a user experience standpoint and I think Gravatars will only get more popular as the web expands, not less. This coupled with the fact, Gravatar plugins are pretty light in terms of development, yet Gravatars are used on every WP website. Plugins done right are marketing tools as well as useful.
The Child themes you can do a lot with for reasons mentioned. I have many customizations I forget about. You can have Stallion child theme developers which is good idea, help get the world out.
SEO Gravatar Hovercard Plugin
Comment titles used as anchor text
Dave just a question on a minor aspect of the Hikari Title Comments feature. I like this new feature you’ve added Stallion Responsive which uses the comment title as the anchor text for the link back to the page (rather than just the post title repeated). It seems like that should generate a great variety of anchor text rather than having it be all the same.
My question is on the words which precede that link, “Comment on [comment title]”. Is “Comment on” necessary to include? Can I just leave this blank in Stallion Responsive Language Options, so that the comment title stands alone? Any adverse effects to doing this?
Doesn’t seem like a big deal either way, but I think it might confuse an occasional reader sometimes if it says “Comment on” and then every comment has a different title (of course as you know that used to just be the post title so I guess it was clearer for people, but then again you’re getting a ton of links using that repeated anchor text).
Thanks,
Erik
Comment titles used as anchor text
WordPress Comment SEO
The “Comment On” text (which can be changed/deleted on the language options page) has no SEO value, there to add some context to the link back to the main post.
For this posts super SEO comments the anchor text for the link back to the main post is “SEO Super Comments WordPress Plugin” which is the “All In One SEO Title” set under the edit Post screen. The Hikari Comment Titles are used to link TO the super comments (not from). So look like you’ve mixed up what is used for the links.
I did consider linking back to the main post with the comment titles, though it would vary the anchor text to the posts a LOT (which would be great SEO wise) from a whitehat SEO perspective (think manual Google reviews) it would be pushing it: ideally links TO something should include relevant anchor text about what the link goes TO, not FROM.
The All In One SEO Title content should be your main title SERP, it’s also used as the title tag for the main post, so is VERY important.
For a highly commented site it’s enhancing the main SERP by linking back with the main title for a post as the anchor text.
David
Edit: realised you meant the actual comments on the posts not the super comments (the super comments also use the “Comments On” text). As above for the actual text, just to add context. Regarding the anchor text using the comment title: these are links to the same page the link is on with an anchor (#comment-34605) to the exact permalink for the comment, permalink for this comment:
From a whitehat perspective using the comment title is fine, the comment is about what the anchor text is and SEO wise it’s awesome having all the varied anchor text even though it’s on the page it’s linked to (it counts).
Really confusing trying to explain this :-)
WordPress Comment SEO
Optimizing WP comment titles
Right, I was talking about comments on the main page not the actual super comment page, but I can see why it wasn’t clear since as you said “Comment on” also appears on the super comment page itself.
Anyway thanks, this explains it, it was really just about whether those two words served any necessary function. I was guessing they weren’t crucial since it’s really about what the anchor text is, and it’s in all likelihood understood by the context that what a reader is reading is a comment.
And thanks for the extra explanation of this feature. Now to just figure out how to make sure my readers leave great SEO’ed comment titles every-single-time! :)
Optimizing WP comment titles
Comment Titles
The comments titles SEO is an issue, I’ve found the best solution is manually edit them from time to time.
For comments that lack a title add one as soon as possible.
For not so good comment titles, depends how bad the title is, if really bad edit it ASAP.
The rest check them on a regular basis and modify to support your sites SERPs.
It’s about giving the comments context and gaining SEO benefit. If you have a lot of not so good titles they are highly unlikely to rank for anything in Google and so less traffic and don’t add SEO benefit to the main article.
Don’t be concerned about using the same comment title multiple times, even though ideally all comment titles would be unique it’s not easy creating a unique title for 50+ comments on a post (on this site I manually edited all 3,000+ comment titles including using keyword research to know what to target).
The comment title used for this comment (Comment titles) has probably been used for other comments on the article about comment titles. The anchor text will help this post because it includes one of the main keywords “comment”.
David
Comment Titles
Comment Titles Effect on SEO
Hi Dave, helpful stuff as always. A couple of questions came to mind that may be relevant for anyone wondering how to optimize comment titles.
1- Reading your advice on editing comment titles above, do you think that bad comment titles could actually hurt SERPs under this new setup? I have over 35,000 comments on one of my sites, and going through them all would be a big project. I know there are a lot of poor titles or non-existent titles in many cases. But maybe I should do so at least for my most important pages…trying to figure out a strategy to best address this.
2- Should every comment have a title, or just the longer ones (for instance, the 400-character minimum Super Comment-level comments)? My site gets quite a few meaty comments, but also there is a lot of back and forth banter which helps the community going, but these are one-line comments such as someone just saying thank you to another reader. It seems sort of overkill to assign a title to those small comments, but just curious what you think.
It’s good to hear that replicating some comment titles is okay, I agree that would be tough to come up with that many unique ones.
Comment Titles Effect on SEO
Comment Title Anchor Text SEO
On point 1 it’s swings and roundabouts.
You can argue EVERY comment should have a unique title AND support the main article by using relevant keywords (to the main article) in the comment title (it’s used as anchor text) AND the comment title should be relevant to the comment as well.
Not asking too much :-)
However, in the real world not every link from a page is perfectly SEO’d and if you have a highly commented post it could also be argued having say 50 links on a page using perfectly SEO’d anchor text might not be ideal.
The way I view it is from an individual comment with a bad title it’s wasting that comment, but as a group of comments having some not so good titles could help with the main posts SERPs. I’m not one to believe there’s a Google over optimization penalty per se, BUT we have to be reasonable, the line between search engine optimized and SEO SPAM isn’t always that wide, so best to err on the side of caution.
If you have a post about “Comment Titles” and a small number of comments, having them pretty much all target SERPs related to “Comment Titles” makes sense and is easy. The same article with 100 comments though, it’s going to be difficult to give all 100 comments a unique title using that phrase or a derivative and commenter’s tend not to always stick to the subject making it almost impossible to achieve perfect SEO. So in the real world it’s not an issue, even if you optimize every comment title to try to help the main article whilst always covering what the comment is about, the overall anchor text is going to be far from perfect: I think that’s good, it’s more natural, IF Google has a filter looking for too many links from a page with perfect anchor text you won’t trip it.
On point 2 in an ideal world every comment will have a title including the short comments because there’s the anchor text from the comment permalink (this is the comment permalink to your last comment: https://stallion-theme.co.uk/stallion-seo-super-comments-plugin/comment-page-2/#comment-36499) and this link (which is a link back to self with an anchor #comment-36499) is generated for every comment. Almost every theme will have this comment permalink, with Stallion the anchor text is optimized, with most themes it’s the date of the comment. For your comment in TwentyFourteen theme the anchor text would be “23rd July 2014 at 5:07pm” which is awful SEO wise and damaging having all that anchor text on a similar theme that’s NOT about the content!
By default Stallion mixes up the anchor text of the comments IF you’ve set the Stallion keyphrases. If those keyphrases aren’t set it uses the title of the post for them all if a comment title isn’t set (the comment title is used if available). If you have the keyphrases set and threaded comments (so visitors can reply to comments) each level of the thread uses a different Stallion keyphrase, so you’ll find the anchor text does vary, but ideally it would be a unique(ish) comment titles.
With so many comments it’s too much work to manually edit them all, I know I’ve edited over 3,000 and it took ages! I would concentrate on your most important posts, try to make a decent dent in the number with SEO comment titles concentrating on the comments that are large enough to generate a link to their SEO super comment: they can generate traffic in their own right as well.
I’ve got a joke site with one post with over 9,000 comments! Most are not very big, not particularly well formed (bunch of racists trashing each other!) and the comment titles that have been set are awful SEO wise, but the post is number 2 in Google for the two word main SERP. The page generates around 30,000 Google search impressions a month with a CTR of ~15%. Even without going to all the trouble of SEOing every comment title the overall SEO works: maybe it would do better if I spent a week modifying the comment titles, but I’m not editing 9,000 comments for one post!
As I mentioned above the alternative output is what TwentyFourteen does, comment permalinks with the date as anchor text, even the worst comment titles are better than the date.
David
Comment Title Anchor Text SEO