I have just integrated Disqus comments service on my blog. Main reason is Google’s PageRank flow NoFollow change that Matt Cutts recently announced:
So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed?
Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (Nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page).
Google has now changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.
For background information on Google PageRank, internal linking and PageRank flow please read: Optimize Link Juice Flow To Improve Google Rankings.
NoFollow links now take away your PageRank juice
Nofollow links still don’t pass PageRank and still don’t pass anchortext so they don’t help sites rank higher in Google’s search results. But nofollow links now take away PageRank juice from your blog. By default all the links in comments section in WordPress are nofollow.
This means that your nofollow links in comments of your blog, and in my case I also had links to Twitter usernames of commentators, will be leaking a lot of PageRank value from your non-nofollow links.
And they are leaking your PageRank to no use as they do not help anyone rank. The result is that your blog is losing valuable PageRank value flow and your important internal links get less PageRank juice.
Less links means more rankings
The more links you have on a page, the less PageRank value each link will get. The more links (follow or nofollow) you have in comments, the less PageRank value is passed onto your normal, non-nofollow links in your blog navigation, blog sidebar and your blog content.
In regards to optimizing your blog’s chances of ranking well in search engines, the solution seems to be to keep nofollowing links you do not want to pass your link juice to but more importantly to try to restrict and limit the number of links as they all take away from your pagerank value.
What does Disqus have to do with this?
Disqus uses an external javascript in the comments section, the so-called iframe. The comments actually reside on a different page and Google doesn’t crawl / follow that.
So now it means that I will have a lot less outgoing links in my blog articles to take away my pagerank juice as Google will not follow any of the links from the comments section. Majority of my pagerank will be distributed within the links in my internal blog linking structure which means that I may be able to rank better.
The problem created with the PageRank flow change seems to be solved with this implementation or is it?
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{ 43 comments }
I have a question: I'm using Intense Debate commenting in my blogger site. are your assumptions for disqus still applicable for intensedebate?
I didn't look into Intense Debate to be honest so I do not know, but I believe it's very similar to Disqus so should work. You can probably find more info on their site / forum.
Not to be rude, but I think the first comment was spot on. Really guys, what does it matter what grade uncle Google gives you? It doesn't affect your SERPS in any way. I have a PR0 site, which has been ranked in 3rd position for a very competitive keyword with over 83 million results.
All PR does is create value for those who think PR has value.
Besides, iframing your comments is great,but what if the disqus servers fail? Bye bye comments. Oh, and not to mention the fact that Google will not count any of the new user-generated content towards your site. All those comments are indexed through the disqus site by Google. I'd happily lose my linkjuice if it means I'm gaining new content.
I agree with you Bob, and I think that people who is interested on PageRank mostly are the advertisers.. So .. People who created websites or blogs for making money from it they should be working to get higher PR all the time!
nice blog, thanks for the post.
nice post, thanks for the share
I don’t really care much about PR although I check from time to time. And I do practice dofollow and pass on the link love.
Shouldn’t the real factor in deciding what kind of option to use for your comments section be the actual commentors themselves? I would think making your comments section more appealing and user friendly would take precedence over what rankings you get.
Just my 2 cents.
The problem with that is that only a small percentage of your visitors actually comment on your blog. I think it is somewhere around 2% or so! So by making something according to those 2% and kind of ignoring the rest, is a pretty large risk to take.
Sir you have mentioned the great point here. I have also installed disqus comment form on my blog. I did not know about it before. So I think I have done good by putting disqus comment on my blog.
I disagree. Having your blog comments on an iframe can actually hurt your rankings, because it’s less content for search engines to crawl.
No-followed outbound links on comments won’t neither hurt your rankings nor the PR flowing to your important links. Google is putting much emphasis on the link position on the page and context, so PR flow is not a matter of X divided by Y anymore, it’s getting more and more semantical.
Thanks for the post. You turned me on to a lot of very useful tips and tools.