Three Reasons to Not Use Disqus
Commenting systems for blogs can be finnicky - short of some custom development, they never do exactly what you want them to do.
Enter Disqus, a young start up that’s providing an elegant solution to the commenting dilemma. Fred Wilson offers an interesting look on why the serious blogger should use Disqus in place of a blog’s default commenting system.
Fred’s reflections are valid and sound, but I’ve got a few bones to pick with the company. Granted they’ve gained major traction in a little over a year, but if you’re a serious blogger with serious needs, I’m not sure that Disqus hits the mark - yet.
1) SEO Bust
Comments are useful SEO juice, as they help flesh out and contextualize a page. And assuming you have consistent discussion within your posts, they help keep pages fresh and more relevant.
Disqus is essentially a javascript application, meaning that you drop in a line of code to replace your commenting system. Everything - from the actual comment form to the comments - are housed on your Disqus page (i.e. myblog.disqus.com), meaning the actual comments don’t truly “live” on your site. The result? None of those conversations or threads get indexed as being on your blog.
2) Linkbacks
Linkbacks fall into the blogger love category - you write something interesting, another site links back for whatever reason, and your link love goes up. Disqus does not recognize linkbacks (at least ostensibly), so while your site still benefits from the link juice, there’s no way to display those linkbacks on your site.
3) Hang time
This is the real killer for me, and yet another limitation of relying on a third party app.
Disqus takes time to load. It’s not a lot, but it’s additional time on top of all the other content that needs to load each time a visitor goes to your site. It isn’t the end of the world, but it does speak to the limitations of developing your product as an application.
In the end, Disqus is making a smart by housing everything on their site - it makes Disqus a destination, in some sense. However, commenting is blog specific and should be blog native. I’d like to see more integration down the road.