Personally, one of my favorite features on my site is the commenting, which is powered by Disqus.
But this being a site on search engines and SEO, how do I get around making sure Google, Bing and other search engines can index the comments? As many people know, Disqus comments are viewable only through JavaScript - so how do you get the comments to be indexed by the search engines?
When we implemented this on version 4 of the Search Engine Roundtable, I made sure to leverage the Disqus API.
Why?
(1) I wanted to own all the comments and have them as a backup in my own database.
(2) I wanted to make them search engine friendly
(3) But I also love the user interface and ease of commenting via Disqus, so I took that
(4) I also wanted Disqus to deal with the comment spam and server load issues caused by that.
So to a user, the comments seem to be fully powered by Disqus. But I manage the comments via the API but on the CMS backend we built. So when I remove a comment for spam, it removes it from both the search engine's view and user's view.
Let me say that this is not cloaking or anything like that because users and search engines are seeing the exact same content.
That being said, let me show you how it works.
Here are some comments on the blog:
If you view source, they show in the source code as this:
And yes, Google knows about the comments, it shows up for searches for the comments:
Anyway, it works well for me and I kind of feel I get the best of both worlds with this solution. It isn't "easy" to code this all out, but I feel the approved comments add a lot to the articles I post here and thus want them indexed by the search engines.
Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.
Note: This story was written earlier this week and scheduled to be published today.
