Website Usability on a Website with Lots of Comments

Comment on Comments WordPress SEO Plugin by SEO Dave.

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:

site:https://stallion-theme.co.uk/ ?cid=

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