Pros & Cons Of Closing Forum Discussions To New Comments

[94501]

I work with a site that gets lots of members and conversions from its specialty interest community forum out of organic search. The site has been around for a number of years and still has many forum pages that do well in search that are 5+ years old. Some of these discussions may have dozens of comments and a few have thousand words.

The option has been floated to end accepting new comments on specific discussions at some point. I can see the negatives, such as folks coming out of search and wanting to register to comment, but not be able to... if we closed the discussion to new comments.

I've always assumed that new comments may freshen up a page a little organic search-wise, but honestly don't know how much that matters.

Are  there any good reasons to close a discussion to new comments? Related question, what do you think is the optimum qty of unique text before paginating?

Thanks!

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Are  there any good reasons to close a discussion to new comments?

comments going off topic, a topic that can be split into several threads instead of one, low quality comments, hard to find information (poor ux). But overall, I think it would be great to just keep updating a strong thread. Keep building the authority + hit more long tail kws + QDF bump.

what do you think is the optimum qty of unique text before paginating?

I think this would be more of a UX issue as "paginated" pages are treated as part of a series.

[ChrisAshton]

It can depend on the type of site you're running I suppose but generally I see too many benefits to fresh user generated content to go closing them.

If you had topics that were particularly seasonal and no benefit could be had from yourself or users after a certain date (maybe an obsolete product that you don't want new buyers to confuse with the latest version) it may be worth closing comments and providing a link to a discussion on the new product.

You're on the right track in that user-generated content is a great thing for your brand/product, user engagement and SEO in general so the more legitimate interaction you have the better. Fresh content is what search engines look for and genuine discussion gives users a reason to frequently return to your site, allowing you to build that rapport.

As far as quantity of unique text, Oleg is right in that this becomes almost a pure UX question. Whatever works best for user intent is what you should be doing in this case. I personally prefer minimal pagination, especially on mobile but I'm just 1 user and may not even be your target audience.

[94501]

Hi Oleg & Chris,

Thanks for the answers. This is exactly what I've been thinking, but wanted to sanity check it... just to make sure I wasn't just having an initial negative reaction to someone else's idea.

Best... Mike