Google confirms fixing issue with indexing Disqus comments

Google’s Martin Splitt confirmed earlier this week that Google has fixed an issue with indexing and ranking some content found within the Disqus commenting platform. It is not clear how many sites were impacted by this issue, but Google said it is now resolved.

What is Disqus? Disqus is a commenting platform that allows blogs and publishers to add comments to their web sites. While a lot of sites no longer allow user-generated comments on their sites, Disqus is a still fairly popular platform used to manage, maintain and moderate comments.

The issue. It is not exactly clear how long Google had issues indexing Disqus comments. When Disqus first launched, I know many blog platforms that wanted their comments visible to Google had to use workarounds to get them indexed. But as Google became better at rendering JavaScript, it began to index most Disqus comments by default. But not all.

Glenn Gabe wrote a detailed blog post last December documenting the issues Google has with indexing some comments powered by Disqus.

Google fixed the issue. Last week, Gary Illyes from Google took notice of the issue via a tweet and passed it along to his colleague Martin Splitt. Splitt spotted the issue and escalated it internally within Google. Splitt said on Twitter on June 18th, “This looks like a glitch on our end. Keep an eye on this the next couple of days, it should eventually, possibly, work.”

A couple of days later, on June 20th, Splitt said it is now working and, “It’s been resolved for everyone.”

Hi Martin,
Update: We are able to see the comments from that page in Google search now. Thanks.
But, we have this same issue on complete domain & sub-domain. And comments from these other pages r not visible in search.
Smthing needs to b fixed for these as well at Google’s end?

— Praveen Sharma (@i_praveensharma) June 20, 2020

Why we care. If you or your clients use Disqus, you should keep an eye on your rankings and indexing patterns. If the content in those Disqus comments were previously not indexed, you may notice ranking changes after Google begins indexing them — in either a positive or negative way. You also may want to adjust how those comments are displayed to Google, depending on what you see.