I’m just stating another reason to implement the feature that was asked for in the OP. I’m not overly interested in SEO, but in this case it seems straightforward.
My real question was what the UI for the feature should look like. The WordPress plugin relies on a moderator having liked a post: discourse/lib/filter_best_posts.rb at main · discourse/discourse · GitHub. It would be easy to add that functionality to embedded comments, but it doesn’t seem like the ideal way to control which comments are displayed.
I’m not sure how much interest there is in promoting the use of Discourse as a comment system for websites. Maybe that deserves a separate topic.