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Ask HN: Is Disqus "Truly SEO-Compatible" like they say it is?

13 points by maxcameron ↗ HN
I was just reading the Disqus 2012 announcement blog post:

http://blog.disqus.com/post/22325598158/try-out-disqus-2012

And on that page is says that Disqus 2012 is, "Truly SEO-compatible. The new Disqus integrates in a way that is naturally discoverable by Google — out of the box, without any extra work."

This leads me to believe that if I search for a comment on google, it should show me the page where that comment was written.

To test that out, I found a comment on the blog post I mentioned above, wrapped it in quotes, and searched it using Google.

The comment reads, "I feel the voting system is ripe for abuse and will be used to silence dissenters. By making it anonymous you're really making it too easy for that to happen."

No results were found.

So is Disqus 2012 really SEO-compatible?

11 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 46.0 ms ] thread
staunch
I just tested the same thing on Fred Wilson's blog. You're right, it doesn't work. Disqus is probably wrong to make that claim. If they had a very simple Wordpress plugin they could serve up cached results to Google in the server-generated HTML (mostly just for Google) and still use Javascript the same way they do now.

That would be as SEO-compatible as possible.

maxcameron
Yeah, that's what we were thinking too, but it wouldn't be out of the box then, right?
zeeg
That's unrelated to Disqus 2012. Disqus 2012 is indexable by Google without any software (such as a WordPress plugin) being installed on the host's server.
zeeg
We've actually had support for this in our WordPress plugin for quite some time (longer than I can figure out, at least 2 years). What we're addressing with our new platform is unrelated to what the WordPress plugin already provides.
thenextcorner
At least it's not an issue with the speed of Google indexing, as this HN post is already in their index, and at the top when you search for "I feel the voting system is ripe for abuse and will be used to silence dissenters. By making it anonymous you're really making it too easy for that to happen."
TomGullen
Google indexes popular websites very fast, but smaller websites wont be crawled at this speed.
TomGullen
Disqus comments are loaded with AJAX as you probably all know. Try disabling Javascript, no comments show.

This is most certainly not SEO friendly, as it is not discoverable by Google. I have heard that Google can run Javascript in crawl and index content that is loaded this way, but it's still a bad idea to rely on that. Also worth considering is that they might only enable this sort of content discovery on sites with enough value (large enough).

It seems to be a design problem to me, because it's a third party plugin I don't see any easy way to get around this, unless Disqus are talking directly to Google to get this solved.

From a purely SEO perspective in my opinion and from my understanding, it's bad, and SEO benefits are non-existent/minimal. This is one of the reasons I don't like surrendering control of some important aspects of my websites to third party services.

zeeg
We'll be talking about this more in the future, but we have confirmed with at least one major index that the content will be indexed as expected within the new system.

Edit: And since we seem to have already named Google, it's obvious who that is.

maxcameron
Hey Zeeg,

Any recco's/best practices on how to best give indexing attribution to the correct site? Any resources you can point us to?

Thanks

Max

maxcameron
Also - will anyone be able to take advantage of these developments, or do you need to have a special deal in place with Google?