

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

I was just reading the Disqus 2012 announcement blog post:<p>http://blog.disqus.com/post/22325598158/try-out-disqus-2012<p>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."<p>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.<p>To test that out, I found a comment on the blog post I mentioned above, wrapped it in quotes, and searched it using Google.<p>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."<p>No results were found.<p>So is Disqus 2012 really SEO-compatible?
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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.

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maxcameron
Yeah, that's what we were thinking too, but it wouldn't be out of the box
then, right?

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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.

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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.

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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."

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TomGullen
Google indexes popular websites very fast, but smaller websites wont be
crawled at this speed.

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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?

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clarke78
[http://www.tomshardware.com/news/google-googlebot-ajax-
javas...](http://www.tomshardware.com/news/google-googlebot-ajax-javascript-
content,13881.html)

