Bloggers: Disqus doesn’t help you in Google

well i guess i won’t be using that service…

Fortunately, we are figuring it out.

I left a comment on Steve’s post that clarifies a few things:
http://blogbusinesssummit.com/2007/12/disqus-scoble-winer-and-fred-wilson-like-it-why-i-dont.htm#comment-25487

We’ve already made updates that address many concerns.

Also, we made a blog post recently that touches upon this: http://blog.disqus.net/2007/12/07/on-content-ownership-or-how-disqus-received-a-lawsuit-threat/

Thanks!

That turned me off as well as the fact that the other big player, Intense Debate, doesn’t seem to handle trackbacks at all either.

Using a centralized system like that is kind of like blogging on facebook, your creating content for someone else ultimately.

Since all these comment widgets are Javascript based, they can never be indexed by Google.

So there is no chance of the content being tagged as duplicate, but the certainty of no content being indexed (from the host blog).

@Pratham – Google’s been making noises about indexing JS content for a while now… It’ll happen someday.

I commented on Steve’s post, but I’ll comment here too.

I think bloggers are approaching this issue from the wrong angle. You need to think about user VALUE (the readers of the blogs), not about how to maximize the marketing exposure of your blog. Nothing is better marketing than having a better product.

Blog comments right now are pretty painful. They’re hard to follow threads, rife with spam (or self-promotion), hard to scan (in high volume), etc.

But, if you’re going to be a slave to page views and exposure, you should consider the SEO/traffic benefits of Disqus. All of the pages actually provide a nice pile of incoming links from Disqus.com. They also promote lively conversations on their home page (more SEO juice) and presumably could eventually offer TechMeme-like aggregation of conversations around a topic (yet more promotion).

Apparently, self-hosted folks can use the API rather than JS– comments are perfectly SEO-friendly if you go this route.

Dear Scoble

I wrote a follow up. Will you care to read it ?

Tech For Novices

I agree with Tony above about focusing first on the user experience, but SEO/indexing comments is important and will only become moreso. Pratham suggests that Google must index JavaScript in order to index (and attribute) comments for a given site. This is not true. JS-Kit’s comments service allows google to index comments without any Google code modifications. A simple DNS change allows everything to happen off-band. Take a look at http://js-kit.com/comments/custom.html (#10) for details and check out our other services while you’re there!

Cheers!
Eric at js-kit dot com

JS-Kit Comments already supports Google indexing.

We have over 10,000 blogs using our Comments and Ratings service because we provide elegant solutions for SEO, SPAM filtering, and pre/post moderation.

Thank you,

Khris, CEO
JS-Kit

khris at js-kit.com

From the JS-Kit site, it looks like they just have the RSS indexed by search engines. And you have to modify a DNS record to feign it coming from your domain. That’s far form an elegant solution.

It’s still up to search engines like Google to crawl included JavaScript.

One thing that really bugs me about disqus after using it is they really don’t solve any existing problems of centralized comments or offer anything exciting, yet they still get more press than intense debate, cocomment, or js-kit. The only reason I can think of is that they’re a y-combinator startup, and that makes me really wonder about tech news. Daniel Ha spends more time replying to every blog post about disqus than actually creating a better product. In my opinion, disqus isn’t worth trying.

I was not impressed with Disqus either.

Hi Jayanthi,

You indicate that the JS-Kit solution lacks elegance.

Please consider that JS-Kit Comments:

~ Require no changes from Google
~ Can be implemented in minutes
~ Gives the publisher complete SEO of UGC
~ Provides the publisher with full access to their
content

In your opinion, what would you propose that is more elegant and as practical?

Happy Holidays,

Khris, CEO
JS-Kit

khris at js-kit.com

I have read that many top blogs haven't lost any rankings once they added DISQUS. It may not help you though it doesn't seem to hurt. My traffic hasn't dropped at all since I added DISQUS.

The ability to interact at a much higher level and have more conversations with your readers could out way any drawback to how Google indexes the service.

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I work as a SEO specialist and let me tell you that the Disqus doesn't not have a negative impact on your rank. Many people have raised this question, but if you search google for a specific keyword on blogs that use Disqus, you will see that Google indexes the page and the comments as well, although a 3rd party commenting system is used.
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So there is no chance of the content being tagged as duplicate, but the certainty of no content being indexed (from the host blog).

very useful like the disqus too, and finding to migrate on my blog

http://macpress.org