Article comment strategies

[Dan Morgan]

Thinking overall about general page aesthetics, as well as impact on SE, but on an article page where comments are enabled, is this page content growth wise after a time?

For instance, I have some popular product review pages where the amount of comments means the page is 10+ scrolls long - that cannot be good for overall keywork density of the keywords/phrases targetted, but then you also do not want to discourage essentially free content and regularly updated pages.

Having the comments on another page is an option, with perhaps the latest few listed, but I also do not want to interupt the flow of reading for my readers *just* for SE benefit.

Any thoughts?

[Sean]

For product reviews, I like the idea of having people be able to vote if the review was helpful to them, then display the one review with the most votes as helpful as a "featured product review". Then have the rest on another page linked to with something like "view all reviews" or whatever.

As far as comments on just regular information articles, I like the idea of having all of them on a different page with a link to it like "add/view comments".

I've seen some sites that, when an article is created, automatically create a forum thread to go with it for commenting on that article. The article has a link to the thread something like "Discuss this Article in the forums" and the thread as has a link to the article with something like: "This thread is for commenting on <link>Article Name</link>." Could be a good idea if you have a forum with the site.

[Chris]

Voting is definitely a good idea. I typically allow voting them display the 20 best reviews with a link to all the rest.

[Bleys]

How about breaking the comments up into pages? 10-20 comments per page. That would even give you more SE indexable pages, right? I'm talking about something similar to the way Amazon does their reviews. (I guess that's what Chris just said :p)

[Chris]

To get even more you can allow replies to comments, and then each comment is also it's own thread, (I do this on iddb.org)

[Bleys]

To get even more you can allow replies to comments, and then each comment is also it's own thread, (I do this on iddb.org)

Sort of the imdb approach... where their comment system for each film is actually mini-threaded forums.

Is that ever a moderation nightmare for you?

[Chris]

I paid someone to do it... actually IDDB is pretty good, 1% is spam. On my literature site it was like 50%.

[Dan Morgan]

Hmm, I have a problem in that I probably have a 50:50 split as to what are comments or questions, and which are reviews. Hard to apply a black and white rule of thumb.

I think I may reword the copy to promote a review being left, however I do not want to discourage questions by doing this. Early in the sites timeline, it frustrated me that people were posting questions which were never answered due to light traffic over the entire inventory, whereas now there is some definate sticky content in particular product lines.

[The New Guy]

Do you guys feel their is a danger with things like blogs have comments available with no one commenting? I guess it would be similiar to a an empty forum. Does it give off bad vibes like the site is not worth it if no one is commenting? If so, should I/we post fake (by fake I mean us or someone we pay) to post comments?

[Chris]

I do not think people value blogs based on comment levels. Comments are a side, an addendum. Whereas with a forum the posts are the content.

Besides... its relatively easy to get blog comments if you do not require registration. When I first offered comments on my literature site, turning off require registration increased them by 200x maybe. I went from getting a couple every other day to hundreds a day.

Of course it was a moderation nightmare and since I had a large library of comments eventually and wanted full forum integration I eventually moved back to forum based/registration required.

[The New Guy]

Well, some of your site which you have added blogs to were well established. I'm thinking more on the lines of your gardening blog (which I see does get some comments).

This might just be me but, often when looking at tech blogs (for example), because there are so many, I do take comment count to be an indicator how good the blog is. If the comments are many, well written and thought out it tells me that the blog has a following, that it is updated regularly and that what is being said has meaning (alot of meaningless blogs out there). And, while I think because of the blog culture, bloggers are resistent to "fake" comments to make it seem more popular. Yet, because we have seen this kind of success with forums I wonder if it is a viable option for blogs aswell.

Even 1 comment looks better then a page full of 0 comments.

[Chris]

My gardening blog was my first blog, the first blog I've promoted from scratch.

I couldn't believe how easy it was to get incoming links and visitors. People link to blogs like crazy.

[Vinnie]

You'll get blog comments if you talk about something even faintly appealing to more than yourself. It's not that difficult and fake commenting is unnecessary.