Guardian makes its comments accessible, SEO friendly and mobile friendly all in one go!
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.
