Do comments section add SEO value?

Hi,

I have several pages that have pretty lengthy comments sections with a lot of back and forth between users (using wordpress platform). The comments section are nofollow, so links obviously don't give juice to outbound pages. But do the comments section actually add SEO content value to the actual page itself? I noticed that comments in wordpress have their own specific url like: www.examplewebsite.com/page1/comment#1, but when i use the function cache:www.examplewebsite.com/page1 google shows me all the comments associated with that page.

thanks

Comments = unique related content = Google love + user retention. This is how I see things.

Yep, many times when I searched on something, the actual text is actually from the comment section. It also looks good on your site, make it looks active, so long as its not spammy

like they all said - if it's genuine comments and user interaction it should be OK.

If they're GENUINE comments, from real people, and not some comment-spamming software, then yes, they do add value. You're creating a lot of social signals and traffic, which Google will see as your page being more relevant. Active social communities can get higher rankings and much more traffic than commercially SEO'd pages alone.

if your page has a lot of comments that is a indication that your website is healthy and active. people love to read unique content and that is the key to have a real comments. the more active your site is, the more traffic you get. So comment has a value in SEO.

Just for reference, a # in a URL just tells the browser to jump to a certain point in the page. So there's still only one page, but there's a hidden anchor called 1 in there that the browser will jump to if you navigate there. As far as the engines are concerned there's just one page.

dannyhw said:

Just for reference, a # in a URL just tells the browser to jump to a certain point in the page. So there's still only one page, but there's a hidden anchor called 1 in there that the browser will jump to if you navigate there. As far as the engines are concerned there's just one page.

Click to expand...

How is this changing now that Javascript apps use # for navigation? Engines are javascript-smart now....

bartosimpsonio said:

How is this changing now that Javascript apps use # for navigation? Engines are javascript-smart now....

Click to expand...

It's kind of changed and then changed back. Google was the one who set the standard for hashbangs, but when sites used them there were all sorts of problems with implementation. You use one method of handling them and you have a reliable page that takes forever to load, you use another one and you're adding a single point of failure that can fuck your world up pretty bad. Twitter had major problems because of the first case and Gawker had even bigger ones because of the second.

It's just important to remember that it's an intermediate hack to deal with the popularity of Ajax. Any site developed now should render and all content should be accessible without Javascript. If the preferred UX depends on JS you can do it all with event handlers on anchors with URLs that link to content wrapped in proper semantic HTML. It's actually easier to write, maintain and index that way but sometimes we need to come up with ways to deal with legacy shit.

Google takes the matter into consideration if its unique, well written, contains valued KWs & are done for not linking or spam thing.
Yes its good to have comments on your page, shows people are interested in what you have written.