Not sure I can read Google's mind, but I would think any kind of interaction is social proof, and is a factor in rankings.

I don't use Disqus so can't comment (ha ha no pun intended!) on that.

logic would say yes!
a good comment ads content to the page, if they are displayed its all on the html seen by google, also comments are a social factor showing an interatction,
if you get good comments that add value (they actualy add value )

Well in my opinion, an informative comment should count as content for the page and should be counted as a ranking factor for search engines. Like others said, it shows interaction.

Comments also dilute your content on the page. Especially when you start talking about all the stupid "Hey great post" or "Thanks for the information" kind of bullshit comments.

User generated content is great, but many comments could ruin your keyword density, make high OBL and more.. so you should always monitor it.

If the comments are legit there's nothing wrong with that, big business spends millions every year polling customers.

My advice is, let the comments show as plain text, use an iframe or a suggestion form that will send the traffics question to a disposable email. Forward the disposable email to your real email, that way you can dump the email If it gets blasted with spam & simply create a new disposable email If ever needed. Then turn the question into an optimized FAQ page, use the FAQ page to help rank the target page, or rank both the target page & the FAQ page in the SERPs.

Win, win.

Hey Yukon, thanks for your comment.

I dont understand why you wouldnt want to have the comments in plain text? Could you explain that bit for me please?

I completely agree with the optimized FAQ page. I actually am going to use WP answers (yahoo answers type of theme) on the same domain (in another folder) and direct most of the comments there but right now, due to financial commitments I cannot afford the $70 ish at the moment. Good to hear that its a decent idea

EDIT: Thanks for that disposable email suggestion, love it!

too much spam will kill any site that ask for comments.
You can not hire enough people as the spam comes from bots.

And google does know if the comment is from real people or not.
They just kill your site if they think it is comment spam.

If you think normally about it.

Robots comes to the sites to read all the data in the page. It wont bother weather

it is comments or article in that page.

Every thing in the page will be indexed by the google.

So no doubt about it . Google will index whole thing in the page.

The way I see it, a useful comment on the page should be counted as a ranking factor. This shows interaction within the page. Just saying.

I usually enjoy reading all comments in a post that are legit and fully moderated
by admin specially if the post were exactly what you were looking for on the web.

To OP: Don't expect search engines crawl, index and download your full page. There's
some limits on that that are depending on several factors.

You are absolutely correct dude.

Alright cool, that makes sense. If a blog as facebook comments for example, when I view the page source, the comments are not actually on the page (they are on facebook, iframed on the blog) So using the disqus iframe probably wouldnt be a good idea then? (I have opted out of it at the moment)

Could you elaborate a little please? My latest article is about 3000 ish words (extremely informative, not just aiming for word count) with about 11 pictures and at the moment there are 7ish on-topic comments. What wouldnt Google index in the page? And on a slightly off-topic note, I usually target about 4-6 keywords per article (with that word count, I can easy get enough of them on the page with it being completely spam free). But will Google rank a single article for multiple keywords or would it choose one or two?

People need to stop assuming Google is so stupid. This is 2012 not the 90's. I am sure Google can guess what is a comment and what is not merely by the text above it that reads "comments" or the links that point to it saying "leave a comment". A persons name and a sort chuck of text is also a dead give away as well as how comments are generally laid out. Another give away is that they are mostly at the end of the content.

The fact is none of there posters here know 100% the answer your question and they are just guessing. One thing I am quite sure about though is that Google are smart enough to tell a comment section on a website. Seo is their job and they invest a lot of money in their algorithms.

If I asked you to come up with ways for some software to read a website and find where the comments were I bet you would have loads of ideas. It would be very easy to make something that would locate the comments section on a website with great accuracy. I bet Google as done this as it makes sense that they would.

That's why Forum Posting is one good way of building online reputation aside from getting quality backlinks on it.

In a recent case study I did, a lot of sites I found ranking on page 1 for highly competitive keywords had a comments section for the ranked page, social interaction and fresh content count for something no doubt...

As a final note, I have decided to host the comments on my blog instead of iframing it. This decision is based on my personal preference and the recommendations in the comments above. If anyone else as any recommendations otherwise, would love to hear from you. Otherwise, my question is answered, thank you

Thanks for your reply but my question is that if we are allowing the out bound links to other relevant sites that are commenting on our blog or articles then Is it affect our website serps ranking to go down ? i have seen many of websites that have integrated blog in to their websites and not allow comments at all? Should we have to integrate our blog in to our website or should we have to submit our posts separately on web2.0 sites ? which one is best as per your knowledge ?


do we have to make relevancy of no follow for all the comments that have been made by others on our blog or website ?

Its really up to you mate. I prefer to have a blog and then build backlinks from web 2.0. I think we are going a bit off-topic here lol.

As I mentioned, I usually dont allow any links in my comments (I just delete the commenter and block the IP) but on the odd occasion, I may allow it but then disqus commenting system automatically nofollows it (which is good)