The Guardian has changed its user-generated comment system – moving from a client-side system to a server-side one. (This story was first published here, where you can read a bit more of the background.)

With the old system, once you loaded a story, some javascript would go off and look up readers’ comments and display them. This wasn’t terribly accessible – if you couldn’t or didn’t run javascript, you couldn’t see the comments.

It was also bad for SEO, as search engines couldn’t run the javascript (so couldn’t see the comments). And if your mobile didn’t run javascript (like mine), you couldn’t read the comments either.

With the new system, the comments are just part of the web page, like all the rest of the text.

This is a great change by the Guardian, and not before time. Google has already started to index the text of comments, as this search for some text I left as a comment once shows.

If you notice any problems, they’ve asked you to point them out.

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Matt Wardman has an interesting post on the Economist having its PageRank cut by Google (translation: Google punishes Economist for unknown transgression by giving its website less importance and therefore, probably, lower ranking).

Here’s what he says:

It seems that they have made a basic mistake of selling text links on the home page, which bear no real relation to the content of the page – and then by leaving simple “links” in place which will enhance the position of those client sites in Google.

Both practices are resolutely opposed by Google (summary), and have been for some time.

Here is a screen shot of the bottom of the Economist home page this lunchtime:

The list of advertisers is areas which are often found trying to gain advantage in the search engines by link buying.

… multiple links to the same site, a mass of keywords, and they are simple links that pass pagerank.

… There seem to be several howlersmistakes:

• Text links being sold to advertising Clients not particularly relevant to the page. Bearing in mind that the practice has been under fire from Google for some considerable time, that was asking for trouble.
• Allowing those links to be visible to search engines. The recommendation is to add a “nofollow” attribute to the links, use Javascript, or to use a redirect.
• To do this with Credit Checking Services and “Cheap Loan” Finance companies seems – on top of the above – to be like running a red-flag up the flagpole for the sake of it.

… The moral? Take great care when you implement adverts and text links: you are in bed with an elephant.

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