Can Google Index Disqus Comments? No But Here Is How.

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.

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Is Google Improving Webmaster Tools Notifications Or They Did Already?

A Google blog post said that Google is now going to be sending out more transparent reconsideration request responses and notifications.

Let me quote Google before I get into why this all seems a bit unusual:

Now, if your site is affected by a manual spam action, we may let you know if we were able to revoke that manual action based on your reconsideration request. Or, we could tell you if your site is still in violation of our guidelines. This might be a discouraging thing to hear, but once you know that there is still a problem, it will help you diagnose the issue.

If your site is not actually affected by any manual action (this is the most common scenario), we may let you know that as well. Perhaps your site isn’t being ranked highly by our algorithms, in which case our systems will respond to improvements on the site as changes are made, without your needing to submit a reconsideration request. Or maybe your site has access issues that are preventing Googlebot from crawling and indexing it.

Now, this is all great. But is any of this "new" as in happening in the future or started happening within the past week?

I am not sure.

In June 2009, Google began responding to reconsideration requests, we even questions if they were automated or not a couple months ago. Earlier this year, Google began sendingspam link notifications, telling people they don't have penalties and if they were doingreally bad things.

Maybe it is now official? Maybe even more things are coming with even more specific notifications?

I haven't seen any new notifications reported in the forums, via email to me or on Twitter - at least not yet. Maybe this is just a post to say this is what Google has been working on over the years?

A WebmasterWorld thread has Tedster saying,

I must be missing something, here. Why this blog post now? It was just published September 15, but it's all about the changes in notification messages that are old news in my mind. Maybe it coincides with the new flood of "doorway page" messages and there are other new refinements to their messaging that we haven't noticed here so far.

Anyway, just a heads up and let me know if you do receive new notifications.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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