Tell me more ×
Webmasters Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for pro webmasters. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote 3 down vote favorite

assume you have a blog post... domain.com/blogid/title

and then you have 500 comments on that post.

your blog page shows your post and 10 comments, and then you page comments using ajax. I was thinking about having a link on the blog page with something like "view all comments" and its url would like domain.com/comments/blogid so that users with javascript turned off and googlebot and read all comments by visiting that page. but obviously, first 10 comments would be duplicated, and how does googlebot link the comments back to the original blog post?

Basically, how should I do ajax paging so that it's SEO (googlebot) friendly

share|improve this question

3 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

That won't be an issue. Some of the content is duplicate but not enough of it is to be considered duplicate content. If it were enough then every ecommerce store that sold the same product and used the manufacturers description would be considered duplicate content and only the first to publish it would be in the SERPs. That would be insane.

If you want to display all of the comments for a page and have it associated to a post, have a link that displays all of the comments and the blog post as well. Use rel="canonical" on the version of the page you want to show in the SERPs.

share|improve this answer
That's a good point, but there is still some SEO benefit to writing your own product description instead of using the manufacturers. In any case, I'd like to see the W3C provide some kind of mechanism to semantically link comments and blog posts. – Lèse majesté Nov 19 '10 at 13:07
Naturally. But not everyone does so for a variety of reasons and it certainly shouldn't be necessary just to be in the SERPs. – John Conde♦ Nov 19 '10 at 13:20
up vote 0 down vote

I don't think AJAX is the issue here. The AJAX part of it would simply not be visible to search engines. It's the non-AJAX comment link that is the issue.

I suspect if you have 500 comments, then it won't be an issue since there's relatively little duplicate content. However, if you only have 11-15 comments, then the majority of the comments page will be duplicate content, and that could be an issue.

I'm not sure there's a way around this aside from putting a canonical tag pointing to the original page. But this would mean that only the first 10 comments are indexed and searchable. I suppose you could select which 10 comments to display on the original page so that the best comments are indexed, but this still seems suboptimal.

So in terms of SEO there really isn't a good solution for this problem. Most blogs with paginated comments just live with the duplicate content. You could cluster the comments so that each comment page is at least 50% different from the other pages, but this would result in the number of comments on each page becoming unpredictable, which is poor for usability.

share|improve this answer
up vote 0 down vote

Alternatively, you could load all of the comments into the post and simply reveal the additional comments through an on-demand 'more' functionality.

share|improve this answer

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.