It seems that the typical practice is to link related questions in a comment on the question, but I seem to recall reading that the comments are not exposed to search engines and I think links are an important part of how search engines optimize results.

So, should such links be edited into questions or left as comments? Also, if they should be edited into the question, how should they be presented? (E.g., one might have a separate "section" at the bottom with "Related questions:" or "Possibly related questions:"--or one might try to provide better flow, e.g., "Unlike Why X?(link), this question seeks an answer in this specific context" or "When was X first done(link) does not address later occurrences", though better flow is more difficult, perhaps especially for a question.)

This might well be a question for meta.stackexchange (I only searched meta.christianity), though different SEs might have different preferences and expectations.

From the Stackoverflow FAQ

The "What about similar or related questions?" section of this answer to the question "How should duplicate questions be handled?" indicates one should have a section with a h3 (three # marks) header (with the text "See also") with the question title as the link text.

(In some cases, I think a brief parenthetical description/explanation might be appropriate to clarify the relationship. This would seem to especially apply when linking to one answer; if other decent answers to a question are not sufficiently related, the question title by itself is likely to be less helpful.)


Considering the transient nature of comments, I think it would be better if we edited them into questions.

Comments are often deleted and cannot be restored (or viewed by anyone other than a moderator) so it would be best if we have relevant related links to include them into the post itself.

As far as your last paragraph, while some questions are relevant on MSO, generally things like this are kept as per-site policies and should be discussed and debated here.

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    Links in comments are picked up for the "linked" sidebar, but... I agree that they're better off as edits in general, simply because this allows for others to revise them as necessary. – Shog9 May 15 '13 at 17:16
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    @Shog9: If for some reason a comment with a link is deleted, will the link disappear from the sidebar eventually? I've seen them stick around, but that might just be caching. – Jon Ericson May 15 '13 at 17:49
  • Thanks for your last paragraph. Global (SE) vs. local concerns are not always clear to me. (Will wait a while before accepting this answer [but did +1].) – Paul A. Clayton May 15 '13 at 18:10
  • @Jon: they'll go away eventually, but the list isn't rebuilt in response to comment deletion (or, IIRC, addition, which is probably another good reason not to depend on comments for this). – Shog9 May 15 '13 at 19:47

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