What is the best approach for getting comments indexed, but also providing a great UX?

[JDatSB]

The way our in-house comments system was built, it uses AJAX to call comments as the page is loaded.

I'm working on a set of requirements to convert the system over to be more SEO-friendly.

Today, we have a "load more comments" after the first 20 comments, then it calls the server and loads more comments.

This is what I'm trying to figure out.  Should we load all the comments behind the scenes in the page, then lazy load the comments or use the same "load more" and just load what was already loaded behind the scenes?  Or does anyone have a better suggestion about how to make the comments crawlable for Google?

[TakeshiYoung]

Are the comments really slowing the site down that much? If possible, it would be best to load all the comments at once, then toggle display via javascript.

[JDatSB]

Likely not slowing it down, that's just how the system was originally built (SEO was not taken into account).

Just curious if anyone had a better method to do it.

[JDatSB]

After doing some further research, I looked at comments on big sites like Techcrunch.com and Mashable.com, only to find out that it looks like their comments are not being indexed.  But comments on SEOmoz.org/blog/ are indeed being indexed.  So it leads me to believe that Javascript comments are still a bad idea, no matter how they're loaded in.  That making comment data available directly in the HTML is the way to go.

Does anyone have any data to backup my assumption?

[egorpe]

You are absolutely right. That's why I avoid systems like Disqus and IntenseDebate. Comments = user generated content. I want this to stay on the page as a plain HTML and get indexed.