Disqus and SEO Friendly comments [closed]

Question

I'm looking for a hosted platform for managing comments on my website.

I came across http://disqus.com/.

Disqus seems to be feature rich, with on my top list requirements support for SEO friendly comments.

So I check many website using Disqus and I cannot find any of theme have friendly SEO comments.

For SEO friendly I mean that comments should be considered plain text and be visible in the HTML source page.

Also I notice that Disqus works only with JAVASCRIPT enabled.

• Do you know if the SEO feature for Disqus it is really working and how?
• Most important I need this SEO feature working in Universal Code, I use a custom CMS.

Answer 1

The problem with Disqus is that it uses JavaScript to render comments, so, when robots come to your site, they don't find the comments. Even if it uses index-friendly "#!" URLs, those are still not your page, so, they're not applicable here.

They have a REST API you can use. My idea here is to bring all comments from API by code and write it to HTML inside one container then hide this container via JavaScript (not CSS, as I'm not sure whether robots will hate that, but JS is not discover-able).

Then I'd still have the Disqus JS widget, because the API won't bring me all the nice features Disqus direct use has. When a user adds a link, it won't be added to hidden HTML until the page is refreshed, but who cares, it's hidden anyway, Disqus will update their JavaScript and comment will be visible.

The down-side of course is the user is now downloading the comments twice. You can solve this too by doing some checks for request user-agent string or whatever to tell whether the page is requested by robot or not, and display the comments from the API in HTML only in this case (and then you won't even care about hiding it).

Of course there is a trade-off between time implementing this and how effective-nice it can be, but it's at least achievable.

...
P.S. I also heard the WordPress and Drupal plugins render HTML too in addition to JS. So, if you develop semi-dynamic or CMS websites on top of any of them, you can get that already. See Getting Disqus html code to show in source for SEO purposes.