Your SEO problem with “votes” and “points” keywords is not entirely due to the comment-voting sections. It’s also because of the short blurb above the main article-title.
Google ranks things literally from top-down (in the html)… and that blurb starting “This part of the site is for the discussion of topics” (class = infobar) - appears on most pages, and it appears above the H1 tag containing the article’s title. Thus google thinks it’s MORE important the main content of the article.
If you want that kind of thing to appear above the title… you can actually do funky things with CSS-positioning that will keep it below the article in the html, but appear to the humans as being at the top of the page.
Your SEO problem with “votes” and “points” keywords is not entirely due to the comment-voting sections. It’s also because of the short blurb above the main article-title.
Google ranks things literally from top-down (in the html)… and that blurb starting “This part of the site is for the discussion of topics” (class = infobar) - appears on most pages, and it appears above the H1 tag containing the article’s title. Thus google thinks it’s MORE important the main content of the article.
If you want that kind of thing to appear above the title… you can actually do funky things with CSS-positioning that will keep it below the article in the html, but appear to the humans as being at the top of the page.