Earlier in the week, Google confirmed resolving an issue with indexing and ranking some content on the Disqus commenting platform.
Disqus is a comprehensive blog comment hosting service for websites and online communities that use a networked platform.
As you would expect, publishers and site owners use this platform to add comments to their website. Despite the declining popularity of user-generated comments on sites, Disqus is still relatively popular.
According to a report, almost 120,000 websites in the United States currently use the blog commenting platform. These websites use Disqus to manage, maintain, and moderate comments.
Now, here’s the issue.
When Disqus launched back in October 2007, many site owners wanted their comments to appear on search engines. At the time, Google couldn’t index the comments on the platform, and blogs had to figure out a workaround.
Over time, Google got better at rendering JavaScripts, so it started indexing most of the comments on Disqus by default. Unfortunately, the search engine had problems indexing some comments.
Google Confirms Fixing Disqus Comment Indexing Issue
It’s unclear how long Google has had difficulty indexing Disqus comments. However, earlier in the week, the search and advertising giant confirmed fixing the issue.
Last week, webmaster trend analyst at Google, Gary Illyes noticed the issue via a tweet. Then, he passed it along to a colleague, Martin Splitt, who escalated the problem within Google.
At the time, Splitt wrote on Twitter:
“This looks like a glitch on our end. Keep an eye on this the next couple of days, it should eventually, possibly, work.”
On the 20th of June, just two days after acknowledging the issue, Splitt confirmed that Google had resolved the issue. “It’s been resolved for everyone,” he tweeted.
If the Disqus comment indexing issue affected your website, you might notice changes in ranking as Google begins indexing previously unindexed comments.
Also, this may be an excellent time to perform a quality check on your user-generated content. The comment must meet a specific publishing standard to prevent it from impacting your ranking negatively.
Consider using the noindex robots meta tag to block some comments from Google’s index. After checking, you can remove the tag when you’re satisfied with the quality of the content.
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