If you are a user of the Stallion Responsive WordPress SEO Theme do NOT install the WordPress SEO Comments Plugin discussed below.
Stallion Responsive includes a far more SEO advanced version of the WordPress SEO Comments Plugin that’s fully integrated with other theme package features (for example comment titles). See the Stallion Responsive SEO Super Comments Tutorial for more details.
For all other WordPress theme users the WordPress SEO Comments Plugin below gives Google and other search engines access to your comments in a format that allows search engine spiders to index and rank comments in their own right.
Download WordPress SEO Comments Plugin from WordPress.org plugin repository.
February 5th 2016 Update v2.2 Release:
Fixed a couple of bugs.
Had set the backup template to single.php forgetting that not all themes have a single.php file (Doh!) Changed back to index.php.
I hadn’t set a check that any comment ID accessed was from a published post (or page) and wasn’t in the pending/spam/trash area. Meant if users knew the URL of non-approved comments they could load them as SEO comments. Now only comments from published posts/pages that are approved will load the comment content. Anything else will load the original posts content with a canonical URL to the original post (no SEO value lost or Google getting confused at multiple URLs loading the same content). Thanks to Jessica (see comments) for finding that bug :-)
December 28th 2015 Update v2.1 Release:
I’d forgot to rename a function to avoid a clash with the Stallion Responsive built in version of this plugin (Doh!). So renamed the clashing function name.
Since I was doing an update added two new options, can now set the number of additional comments by the same author. Was fixed at 3 comments from the same post and 5 comments from all posts.
December 27th 2015 Update v2.0 Release:
The custom template option now works with child themes.
Fixed a permalinks bug, when a heavily commented post was paged the links to the SEO comments pages had the wrong URL format.
Few minor code improvements.
SEO Super Comments WordPress Plugin
The new WordPress SEO Comments Plugin is based on the SEO Super Comments WordPress Plugin, see this comment about the history of working with the SEO Super Comments plugin: note this link goes to a comment page created by the WordPress SEO Comments Plugin, see how it’s URL ends in ?cid=6178.
What Does the WordPress SEO Comments Plugin Do?
When the plugin is activated you will find all your WordPress blogs comments generate a post like page that loads the content of a full comment plus recent comments (if any exist) by the same author.
The screenshot below shows a couple of comments at another WordPress SEO Plugin I develop while the default TwentyFourteen WordPress theme was active.
I run Stallion Responsive on this site which is more advanced, easiest way to see this is go look at the user comments below. You can see the comments have titles and the titles are used in place of the “View Comment” anchor text of the links.
With the stand alone WordPress plugin the “View Comment” links go to comment pages that look like this in the TwentyFourteen WordPress Theme.
The text “The Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin is a free plugin, can” is an excerpt of the first 10 words from the comment and is used as the title tag and the header for the comment page. This means the majority of the plugins comment pages will have unique title tags (and headers).
With the free stand alone SEO plugin you have no control over the content of the comment excerpt beyond it’s always the first 10 words: you could edit your comments to add 10 words at the top of your comments so the comment title tag is better SEO’d (this is what I used to do years ago). With Stallion Responsive there’s no need for this because the comments title is used for the title tag and header.
As you can see in the screenshot there’s a heading “David Law Also Commented”, this section will load up to three comments by the same author if the author has commented more than once on that post.
Further down the page are up to 5 further recent comments by the same author.
So in total it could show the comment linked to, 3 comments on the same post and 5 recent comments. If a commenter has made just one comment it will just load that one comment.
WordPress Plugin SEO Benefits
The SEO benefits of Google spidering and indexing your comments is several fold.
Comments are unique content, Google loves unique content and by installing the plugin Google can spider and index your comments in their own right based on the keywords within the comment and NOT the post the comment is attached to per se.
This can add hundreds of new indexed pages to a site thanks to your users comments a lot like a forum. In the screenshot below it shows the number of comment pages indexed in Google from this site, at the time of the search there were around 750 comments indexed this way.
You can check this yourself, since all the comment pages include ?cid= in the URL a modified site: search will show the comment pages indexed.
site:https://stallion-theme.co.uk/ ?cid=
Want to compare to the entire site, use:
site:https://stallion-theme.co.uk/
Just copy and paste the above lines into a Google search and you’ll see the number of pages indexed.
On the 21st April 2014 results are:
Partial ?cid= Google Result: 1,510 pages indexed
Full Site Google Result: 1,910 pages indexed
At this time the site had 107 published posts and 1,685 comments approved. So the vast majority of the comments are indexed in their own right.
On the 28th December 2015 results are:
Partial ?cid= Google Result: 3,110 pages indexed
Full Site Google Result: 4,080 pages indexed
At this time the site had 242 published posts and 4,249 comments approved. So the vast majority of the comments are indexed in their own right.
David Law
My other SEO plugin: Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin.
Website - SEO Gold
WordPress SEO Premium
hello,
It is saying that I have WordPress SEO Premium as a plug in but there is no spots at the bottom of my post for the information. Any ideas?
SEO Comments Plugin and pending/trashed comments
We have a heavily traffic seasonal site and were very excited to use your plug-in this season. However we noticed a problem last night where we moderated a comment and it went to pending as designed. However, because that comment had already been display on the site, another user clicked the “View Comment” link and was able to view the comment despite it being moderated. The same behavior occured when a comment is trashed. This might not be a big deal for most blog if they don’t have heavy volume commenting because there aren’t thousands of users refreshing and reading comments 13k requests a minute. Is there a way to modify this so your plugin excludes comments that are pending, spam or trash? We look forward to your reply.
SEO Comments Plugin and pending/trashed comments
WordPress SEO Comments Plugin Bug
Good catch you found a bug (oversight on my part really).
Basically I’d not checked the comment id was always to an approved comment.
Have made a fix for the Stallion Responsive theme version (similar code to the plugin is built into the SEO theme I develop and it has the same bug) which I’ll put an update out to after testing the fix on some of my popular sites (few days probably).
Wasn’t hard to fix in the theme (running the fix here now), so shouldn’t take long to update the free plugin as well (slightly different code, far less features, but same principal).
When fixed (like on this site) if an SEO comment URL is loaded which isn’t an approved comment like : https://stallion-theme.co.uk/wordpress-seo-comments-plugin/?cid=99999
It will load the main post only and add a canonical URL to that post in the code: that means if your users access the URLs or Google indexes them they won’t see pending/spam/trash comments and medium term if Google had indexed them any SEO benefit will be redirected back to the main post.
Thanks for letting me know.
David
WordPress SEO Comments Plugin Bug
WordPress SEO Comments Plugin v2.2 Update
Since I had all the code to hand from fixing the Stallion Responsive theme and it was an easy fix, I’ve updated the WordPress SEO plugin code to v2.2 which includes a fix for the above bug.
Didn’t document this, but also made a minor change so some code so it only loads when under the admin Dashboard or a user is on a WordPress SEO Comment URL: means a slight performance improvement on categories, posts etc…
David
WordPress SEO Comments Plugin v2.2 Update
WordPress Comments Perfomance Issues
Fabulous! Thanks for the quick response!
I have been hunting for features of plugins that focus on comments because in our situation comments are our primary content, posts are secondary. Was so excited to find yours and it seems to be working great.
I have one feature suggestion if you plan to maintain the plugin as well as the premium theme (I think I’ve ready every page of your site twice three times over.).
Because we have so many comments, when we moderate from the dashboard our load time is sluggish for various reasons but I’m guessing that the View Comment link on edit-comments.php might be an addition contributing factor.
Every second counts for my moderators with the volume of comments we get.
So my suggestion is an option to turn the link off in backend… Since Google isn’t indexing there anyway.
WordPress Comments Perfomance Issues
WordPress Performance Issues
No problem, already put the plugin update out so you should see it as an upgrade on your Dashboard soon.
WordPress performance issues are very common, especially if you run a site with a theme and plugins that haven’t been optimized for performance.
Run your site through https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ and you’ll start to get an idea of what might be causing some issues. Unfortunately won’t help with diagnosing backend issues, there are plugins for this, but they give mixed results.
It’s why I developed an SEO theme that does everything I want, means I can go through the code line by line stripping out anything unnecessary/replacing bad design ideas. My approach is to have a lot of features available, BUT if I’m not using a feature on a site don’t load any of the resources it uses.
WordPress image sliders for example tend to use Jquery to do the fancy effects (big performance hit). Before performance was a big SEO issue I added a slider to Stallion and like all sliders I’ve looked at it needed Jquery for it’s effects.
Since performance is a big SEO issue I don’t use the slider on a single site (I own over 100). On the Stallion Responsive options pages (there’s over a dozen options pages with hundreds of options) there’s a tick box to turn the slider feature on/off.
When set to on, Jquery is loaded, but only where needed.
When set to off, Jquery isn’t loaded and the PHP code that creates the slider isn’t even loaded.
For those that do use the builtin slider there’s options to set where on the site to run it, if set to only run on the home page they only need Jquery to load on the home page. If you aren’t using a slider on posts for example you don’t need to performance killing Jquery feature on posts. So even though sliders are bad performance wise, if you use one take performance into account to minimize the hit.
You will find with many WordPress sliders not only will Jquery load even if you don’t use the slider, it might even load under your dashboard slowing things down at the backend.
You will find this type of poorly thought out design in a lot of themes and plugins, all you can do is learn to weed out the really bad ones. Some are awful, related posts plugins tend to be database hogs! I’ve tested some that added hundreds of database queries on parts of a site where the related posts plugin should even run (home page, categories etc…).
I have my sites set to not even load widgets I’m not using on the widgets page. I have all theses widgets disabled (unregistered):
Default WP Widget Recent Comments
Default WP Widget Calendar
Default WP Widget Meta Links
Default WP Widget Links
Default WP Widget Monthly Archives
Default WP Widget Recent Posts
Default WP Widget RSS
Default WP Widget Pages
Default WP Widget Search
Default WP Widget Categories
Default WP Widget Custom Menu
Only have these two active along with 10 of the 21 Stallion widgets.
Default WP Widget Text
Default WP Widget Tagcloud
Means my server isn’t wasting resources loading features I don’t use, saves me money as I can use cheap virtual servers. On some of my sites I only have 3 or 4 widgets active.
Every bit helps on performance.
David
WordPress Performance Issues
Small SEO Plugin Update
Misunderstood what you meant, made sense to remove the View Comments links under the comments Dashboard.
Version 2.2.1 is available in the WordPress repository now.
David
Bad WordPress SEO Plugin
HELLO! I think this plugin is bad will affect seo site optimization. The point is that the title pages of comments is the same as the main title of the entry. A title must be different.
Page comments is not a unique page. It’s not like search engines. I believe, therefore, that the page comments-this excess debris that could harm the site.
Why WordPress Comments are NOT Duplicate Content to Google
I covered this in a comment I made on a review of the WordPress SEO Comments Plugin, here’s the comment I made to this point:
“You are creating tons of repeatable content, which stands for low quality web pages.”
I guess you mean duplicate content when you say “repeatable content”.
Do you have any sort of archive on your WordPress Blog, dated, home page archive, Categories, Tags even the search pages?
I would assume yes since that’s core WordPress.
All the content within those WordPress archives are duplicated content, do you think Categories are low quality webpages? Or the webpages linked from the categories are low quality?
The content on the categories is reused on the posts or the content on the posts is reused on the categories (depends on how you look at it).
Could be argued we only need one copy of the content, we could add all the content to a small set of category pages (no blog posts, all the posts content directly on the categories: that’s what WordPress does with comments), but that wouldn’t be very user friendly. Visitors would have to scroll through pages and pages worth of content to find what they are looking for.
This is how the WordPress SEO Comments Plugin works with comments.
The comments load at the bottom of your blog posts a sort of comment category. The links go to the comments which are similar in format to WordPress posts.
We could have all the comments stuffed on one page (how most WordPress sites work) or allow Google to index individual comments so search engine visitors can find specific content on your blog.
Search Google for: WordPress Meme Generator Plugin
The second (will change over time) result goes to: https://stallion-theme.co.uk/stallion-responsive-theme/?cid=3646
That’s a blog comment, is that low quality content?
The main post the comment is attached to is at https://stallion-theme.co.uk/stallion-responsive-theme/ currently there’s 27 comments (almost 100 comments now), is a search engine user happened to find that page for the meme SERP (highly unlikely) they would have to look through the entire article and up to 27 comments (100 comments now) to find the relevant information. Is that user friendly?
Google likes the comments like the one above, WordPress comments are content after all, now if you allow really low quality content on your blog, that’s why you’d have low quality content on your blog.
Real WordPress duplicate content issues: Duplicate Content and Canonical URLs
David
Why WordPress Comments are NOT Duplicate Content to Google
Website Usability and WordPress Comments
Still, it is inconvenient for the user! A lot of unnecessary links to View Comment. Moreover, the content View Comment is based on the author of the comment. This is a bad thing. The user will not be fun to watch content only 1 author. It is interesting to see related entries on the subject. For example, see the response comments from other authors.
To do this, the user have to follow links. This extra traffic, which is bad for usability.
Better when there is a simple pagination of comments. A user comes on:
. ../post/comment-page-2
It is on this page sees the comment of one author + other useful comments from other authors. In the end, this page more useful content on the topic. Also on this page, you can see the response comments. It is very good for usability. So very convenient.
Your plugin is-there is no such comment on the page. This is a bad thing.
I believe that the idea of the plugin correctly. However, the decision was a bad way. You cannot create a page View for one Comment comment author. It is better to make a page with many authors comments-(page navigation). For example:
. ../post/comment-page-2
But to do so was:
canonical-../post/comment-page-2.
This is to comment pages indexed. That is, the canonical link coincides with the address of the page comments. It’ll be good for SEO. These pages appear in the index.
Also need to display comments on the page only announcement post (article). So improve the uniqueness of page. Also improved the usability of the site. The user can immediately get to the comments.
Website Usability and WordPress Comments
Website Usability on a Website with Lots of Comments
On website usability and visitors being inconvenienced by the links to the WordPress SEO comments pages.
I’ve been using the WordPress SEO comments plugin feature for at least 7 years, over my network there are over 50,000 comments (over 3,000 comments on this site) : I have a LOT of these SEO comments pages links.
In all that time you are the first person to mention the comment links in a negative way.
Are you forgetting the links added by WordPress, the ones added to the comment permalink:
Users tend to ignore the comments permalinks, they are there for users to share a link directly to a specific comment. Note: screenshot from Stallion Responsive, not the WordPress SEO Comments Plugin. Stallion Responsive adds the comment title (SEO theme feature) as the anchor text, the free SEO plugin adds “View Comment” as anchor text (the free plugin isn’t as good as the premium theme).
Search Engines Indexing WordPress Comments
I think you are missing the whole point of the WordPress SEO comments plugin features. The generated webpages (created from the comments content) are potential access points for long tail keyword phrases the main article might miss. Visitors already on a post tend to ignore the links (like they ignore the comments permalinks links), but as a potential search engine visitor access point they are awesome.
For example I changed your comment title from “Website usability” to “Website Usability and WordPress Comments”: Comment Titles is part of Stallion Responsive, not the WordPress Comments SEO plugin: sorry, only give so much away for free.
SEO Note: For those using the SEO plugin or Stallion Responsive consider how little SEO benefit these indexed comments pages receive (one internal deep link from the main article), the comments pages are not going to be able to target hard SERPs, always target long tail SERPs (or use the internal links back to benefit the main article).
Anyway, “Website Usability and WordPress Comments” is a long tail keyword phrase which isn’t worth targeting a full WordPress Post on (little traffic). Since I’m writing a comment anyway it makes sense to try to generate some traffic from it, so this comment has comment title “Website Usability on a Website with Lots of Comments”. Even an extra visitor a week because a comment is indexed in it’s own right is worth it when you consider how competitive the WordPress SEO niche is.
Search engine users find the Google indexed comments pages via relevant long tail keyword searches (basically free Google traffic). Pop this (a Google site: search) in Google to see most of the indexed SEO comment pages of this website:
These are comments from this website that are indexed due to the WordPress SEO comments feature.
Here’s a few of the comments that are indexed by Google:
Website Usability and WordPress Comments
Stallion WordPress Theme SEO Super Comments
WordPress SEO vs Site Appearance
Yoast WordPress SEO plugin canonical URLs
SEO Test Results – Nofollow Links Passing Anchor Text Benefit
WhiteHat SEO PR Sculpting : WordPress SEO of Categories Siloing
WordPress SEO Test XML Sitemaps Google Traffic Generation
WordPress SEO Comments Plugin Bug
I have thousands of comments indexed this way. These all have the potential of generating traffic from Google at no extra cost. If you have a heavily commented website it’s a no brainer.
You said “The user can immediately get to the comments.” if comments are paginated and not indexed in their own right.
The Stallion Responsive Theme Sales Page has 96 comments. Quickly show me the comments about the “Stallion Responsive 8.1 Update” by scrolling through the paginated comments (7/8 pages worth of comments: good luck with that).
A quick Google search for Stallion Responsive 8.1 Update and there’s a list of indexed comment with links directly to the comments. Stallion Responsive also has a comment search feature, so you could also use that.
If I used default WordPress behavior best I’d get from a Google search would be links to the paginated comments like : https://stallion-theme.co.uk/stallion-responsive-theme/comment-page-4/
Would have to scan through 15 comments to find the relevant comments: not user friendly.
That assumes there isn’t a canonical URL set to : https://stallion-theme.co.uk/stallion-responsive-theme/
on all the paginated comments (that’s default WordPress behavior to set canonicals to the main post) which would mean I’d probably ONLY have the main post listed in Google for searches related to the “Stallion Responsive 8.1 Update” (would only be listed once as well).
That means going through 96 comments via 7 paginated comments pages!!! That is NOT user friendly.
David Law
Website Usability on a Website with Lots of Comments
WordPress Comments and Duplicate Content SEO
I believe that this is not right!
Non-optimized categories and tags it too duplicate content.
However, the problem is that if there is competition for your keyword, and if this category page will have its unique, optimized descriptions, such pages would not go traffic from search.
Will not go because there is no added value (uniqueness) page. For pages that participate in the SERP must be a unique value (unique content):
-for categories, tags, unique description;
-for the master is a static page, or the built-in widget with a unique description;
-for records is a unique post;
-for pages of comments is comments
So search engines easier to distribute content.
Your plugin generates a lot of unnecessary and non-unique pages that create duplicate content spend page weight with fasting.
—————————–
You are right that links with anchor text for better SEO and usability. But I meant free plugin. Yes, pay better. It’s a little easier for the user.
But I still believe that we should not generate so much non-unique pages of comments. Content (value) on such pages is very small.
Typically, customers do not write very large comments. A maximum of a couple of paragraphs. I think that it is not necessary for these couple of paragraphs to form additional page. Moreover there is no retaliatory comments from other users. That’s too bad.
Look at the forums. There’s content is divided into pages (1, 2, 3, 4 …) So there’s little more useless comments. The entire flood (useless messages) are removed. Thus, all messages are related to the topic.
Thank you for your work!
WordPress Comments and Duplicate Content SEO
Nested comments ?
Hi Dave,
Very interesting plugin in my specific case where users write (really) very long comments.
I have been testing and unfortunately it seems that your plugin might not be fully compatible with nested comments/discussion.
On a single page for a comment (?cid=), users do not see the comment replies nor have the option to reply. Do you confirm ? Or is there a workaround ?
Many thanks
Nested comments ?
disabling ads on comment pages
hi, this plugin looks awesome for my purposes, but i would like to know if there is a quick way to disable ads on comments pages (e. adsense, media.net ads). im currently using Ad Inserter Plugin. Just wondering if you have encountered this problem and implemented a solution. thanks