Ask Yoast: Comment systems and SEO

To allow your site's visitors to engage with your content you need a good comment system. There are many systems out there besides the WordPress standard comment system. So, what's their impact on SEO? This Ask Yoast goes into that! Interested in the Yoast Comment Hacks plugin? Find out more about it here: https://yoa.st/3j6 Max sent us his question on comment systems: 'There is no question that the Disqus service takes a little while to load on a webpage. So, do these blog commenting services, like Disqus, affect SEO in some way?' Watch the video or read the transcript below for the answer! The impact of comment systems on SEO: “Do they affect SEO? Well, yes, they do. Because, in fact, they’re so slow to load that most of the time, what you see is that Google doesn’t load the content of those comments, and doesn’t use them to rank that page. Which might be either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how good your comments are and whether your comments have a lot of content or not. I personally don’t like these services because they slow down the page load so much and because they make it slower for people to be able to respond to your content, which is why, on yoast.com, we use the plain vanilla WordPress commenting system with some added features that are in the Yoast Comment Hacks plugin, which we’ve released for free on the repository. So that’s why we use that, and not any service like Disqus. But I know there’s a lot of fans of services like Disqus because of all the other features they have. So it’s a trade-off. We made our choice, you have to make yours. Good luck!”