Not to beat a dead horse here, but I do as well take exception to your assertion that “As a general rule, Google seems to assume that comments are of little value and encourages the use of the nofollow tag in any associated links.” This conflates Google’s perceived value of comments with their perceived value of outbound links in comment spam. It is for this latter purpose that Google recommends using nofollow – indeed, the official Google post introducing nofollow is titled “Preventing comment spam.”

I’m glad you brought up the subject of making comments more useful to readers, as this is often overlooked. I think a lot of insight on this is to be gleaned from review systems (which one might argue are really glorified comments with a rating attached). There one frequently sees reviews which are rated according to their usefulness (think IMDb, Amazon) – and some even incorporate sentiment analysis (most useful positive and negative reviews). That’s where something like “Like” becomes useful – in not only indicating which comments got approval, but in promoting it/them to the top of the stack.

And on the subject of comment usefulness, one comment I can’t resist making. Does this long comment seem really hard to read, once published? The SEP blog might consider manipulating their back end so commenters’ two line breaks in input result in two line breaks in output – i.e., so the paragraphs I can see in this input box are also what appear on the site, rather than a long block of text. While that may seem nit-picky, it is indeed the combination of a lot of small factors – comment permalinks, OpenID signins, formatting options, comment threading, paragraph breaks – that in aggregate add up to comments that are useful to readers.

Happens on forums all the time.

“It then becomes hard to see the good stuff when it is buried under so much dross.”

Just like with forums, moderation is key. Don’t let the dross in. What’s left is just the cream.

Forums are great and have their place, sure, but I do think a similar sense of community (albeit a slightly different type) can be built via blogs/comments. Perhaps it ends up being an “extended community” since it may not always be focused in one place (the blog), but across several places (commenter blogs / social networks) as the bloggers and the commenters begin to create loose communities across all those mediums.
.-= DazzlinDonna recently posted: Challenge Yourself To Create An Exciting Piece of Content =-.

There are plenty several goals of the contest, one of the most important goal was to create a chance to our community to meet with each other and get to know each other more, and we think we have achieved this goal some how! I have met with great bloggers and already started to work with them on new projects which is amazing thing! but of course not everyone could take advantage of this because it depends on the way each one of us understand it, and if he/she can get the idea!

And by the way, we will have judges to help on deciding the winner, so it’s not about how many comments a blog post gets, it’s mainly about the value of the content in the post, if passed then we will look and count only the valuable comments!

For the SEO part, I can not claim experience, but have seen Google SERPs updates while a blog post still getting comments, so basically the keywords of the search was in the (title and the comment) which returns the title of the post plus the part of comment in the SERPs in the search results, and the real content (body) on the post just dispersed from the SERPs!

This makes me believe that Google do NOT neglect comments in the active blogs, but probably a less importance!

I remember once I published a post about “How we create contents from comments” it was based on my experience with working as an editor and moderator in a popular discussion forum for 3 years, I have learned how to create content by asking a question and write short debatable entries, mostly about politics where you can really heat the debate, and we could involve some big names at that time when it goes hot discussion to clear their situation!

So, this is why I was concentrating in the last 9 months on how to engage readers with the blog content to approve that some times comment is the king!

I really think I should end my comment at this post or then I better publish it in a new blog post 🙂

Just want you to know that I really like your writing style, very nice and preferred!
.-= Hesham recently posted: Popup Domination WordPress Plugin is an Exciting List Building Experiment =-.

Now that’s what I agree with, but I don’t agree with you when you say that the value of comments is overrated. Honestly, I think it’s exactly the opposite. The value of comments is underrated. But it all depends upon one’s definition of value. As an SEO, you’re looking at it from the perspective of the value you can gain from that angle. But the real value of comments goes far beyond search. It’s a human connection thing; it’s a community-building thing. That’s where the value is, and that’s another thing that really got reinforced for me after participating in the contest.

Sure, I’m an old SEO, but there really is a world beyond search, and lots of stuff add a lot of value to that world. Comments is one of them. 🙂
.-= DazzlinDonna recently posted: Challenge Yourself To Create An Exciting Piece of Content =-.

May be because of more spam content in the comments, Google is giving it less importance.
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