UGC Comments - Ditch them?

[kmander]

Site: bussongs.com

I have a fairly successful (400k visits/month, 1.2m PV/month) site which features a directory of lyrics-style content. The bulk of the content is not unique and exists in many places across the web.

I figured adding commenting would help add more bulk to each page and give some long-tail on-page KWs. The comments are non-AJAX and Google is crawling the information. There's 10k comments across the site.

I have some automated filters to remove profanity and junk but otherwise comments are published in real time. Because of the niche I target, the quality of spelling/grammar is very low. I don't have any pagination at the moment so some pages are now quite long and the quantity of UGC content is considerably larger than the main content of the page.

Traffic went down post-Panda and has picked up slowly over time - almost back at normal levels. But I feel I could better manage comments and that they do have an impact on SEO.

Do these comments have value? Should I use AJAX to stop crawling? Implement pagination to limit page length? Use plus/minus ranking to give prominence to the better comments?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.  Thanks!

[KaneJamison]

Those comments definitely have value since it's some of your only unique content. There will likely be lots of junk comments, but every few will be decent comments with good references to the songs.

Since your lyrics are for things like kids songs, or christmas songs, and you have a way more attractive theme than most lyrics websites, I could see that earning you some decent comments that people wouldn't post on a junky looking site.

Regarding Pagination / AJAX Alternatives:

AJAX would look nice if you can find a good SEO-friendly version, but that sounds like lots of work with questionable SEO value to me.

How about just loading all comments in a div that has a set height and overflow:auto; in use, and apply some custom formatting to the scrollbar appearance using javascript or jquery?

• http://www.net-kit.com/jquery-custom-scrollbar-plugins/
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1256258/div-scrollbar-any-way-to-style-it
• http://www.n-son.com/scripts/jsScrolling/jsScroller.html

Regarding Spell Checking:

It looks like your whole site is PHP. If you're handy with coding your own PHP, you could quickly borrow the code from a spellchecker such as a wordpress plugin, use it on your comment forms, and make it automatically apply that to the users comment. Then, give the user a pop up window after they click submit that says "Your comment has been spell-checked, click here to edit any of our changes" so that users can override it.

It requires some extra effort upfront on your part, but could result in some very high quality content for the niche.

Add Social Buttons:

I would get Like / Tweet / +1 buttons up on your site, I imagine that will be a good indicator that you're not a junk site. You have share, but these easier-to-click buttons get a way higher usage rate IMO.