Change Blogger-Blogspot Commenting System – Threaded View, Spam Free and More Powerful than WordPress
Posted by: admin / Category: Internet and Networking, Web Developments
When Disqus first launched, I was a little critical because I like to maintain control of comments, give commenters the benefit of Dofollow links, and ultimately retain control of their user generated content.
I now feel that 95% of bloggers should switch to using Disqus, though I have some reservations.
Disqus gives blogger more stable and powerful commenting system. WordPress users can also install Disqus using their plugin.
These are some of the reasons why:
- Matt Cutts today confirmed that nofollow links can reduce the amount of PageRank that flow to internal pages. The easiest current solution to solve this problem is to use Javascript for comments.
It is an external javascript file, which Google can’t really handle currently, and even if they did, the chances are it might only count as a single link to your disqus discussion.
Blogstorm has gone into the problems facing comment links in more detail, something I highlighted when Matt first mentioned this clarification at SMX. - Matt Cutts in the same post highlighted again who you link to matters, and I think Google is going to place more and more emphasis on this. It is a lot of work for the average blogger to keep control of user generated content, and even the best comments sometimes come with spammy links. I have always maintained that “dofollow” isn’t for everyone because of the time commitment.
- Disqus is universal – it can be installed on every major blogging platform – many SEO solutions won’t be universal or easy to implement
- Can Spam & Email Deliverability – this is 50/50 – I have highlighted in the past that.
- Invalidated Cache – this is a major consideration for high traffic blogs, and potentially product launches. The javascript doesn’t change on each new page load, thus your cached content also doesn’t change (if you just use their javascript on your page) – this can represent a major reduction in server load, even if you are using some kind of Op Cache (eaccelerator APC Xcache), RAM based page cache (Memcached) or more advanced techniques using page chunking. Forget conventional WP Cache / Supercache for product launches, it just can’t cope on its own.
- Social Media Viral Effect the social media viral effect of using Discus is significant. Not many people are exposed to services such as backtype, but tons of people use Facebook – implementation of Facebook, Twitter and other logins for commenting whilst possible with WordPress isn’t trivial, and that is more plugins to deal with, more server load etc.
- Get to visit Disqus more often – I sometimes leave comments on other blogs that are using Disqus, and sometimes the comment notifications don’t get to me (deliverability issues)
The SEO problems with Disqus are fixable, and in the current Google climate could offer significant advantages – plus Disqus could conservatively gain at least 400% traffic even without new adoption.
It is possible even if they also gave much more SEO friendly links throughout the whole site.
I am recommending Disqus above competitors JSKit and Intense Debate because both of these services the email subscriptions don’t stack in Gmail – a nightmare if you subscribe to comments on a popular blog, plus I believe there is more chance of Disqus fixing problems for a win/win solution.
