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I was recently asked why I haven’t switched to Facebook commenting for WordPress and I remember having looked at this in detail a while back and the same reasons remain today on why I didn’t switch last year. Most notably I had been paying attention to other blogs that experimented with Facebook commenting and most of them had since switched back, this included a blog I was following called BitRebels which confirmed they had lower engagement with Facebook commenting despite thinking it would bring in more comments.
Now don’t get me wrong, I think Facebook commenting has an easier potential to bring feedback and engagement, but I wonder if it will benefit the blog site and the article. For one some of the issues with Facebook commenting remain as follows:
- No moderation at all, you never can moderate the comments, they are there.
- No notifications or subscription ever, unless you manually go into each conversation and follow it manually.
- Only FB can comment, there are 800 million FB users, there are billions of non-FB users.
- No subscriptions for future comments by author, so you can follow a Disqus profile and see all future conversations on any site, can’t do that.
- Comments not in HTML source for Google, for valuable comments the comment itself doesn’t show in blog page HTML, since it is framed in from Facebook, so no SEO benefit to post, this doesn’t apply to the useless comments but for ones that add value, the SEO value of the comment is lost, Google itself cannot track and show relevance to the comments.
Of course these same limitations apply to Google Plus commenting but I think there may be more SEO benefit to having Google Plus commenting and activity. Still the basic WordPress commenting draws too much spam and even with CommentLuv and other plugins you will get spam and those who try to leave comments for the link, this does occur with Disqus and will occur with Facebook as well though there is no easy way to moderate those comments left on Facebook that are spam. I have seen that you can hide them, but you can’t truly remove them.
I still use Disqus because of the reply via email feature as well, I simply get an email about a comment left and I can reply via email and my reply will be sorted in the comment thread properly. Then of course, I like Disqus because you can earn money with their discovery program which adds related and featured content next to the commenting. It doesn’t earn a ton, but it does earn an amount that keeps growing as the blog and commenting grows.
I would like to see it up in the $50 or $100 per month range, which I think it will eventually reach as it keeps growing. They do make you wait until $100 has been earned so it takes a long time to get a payout, you can also see they have a 3 month delay on payments, so MAR will pay over in JUNE so it means it will likely be October/November before I get my first $100 payment from Disqus Discovery, but it is still something.
So for now I am still sticking with Disqus and most people don’t even realize you can comment as a guest without signing in, which is something Facebook or Google Plus comments can’t do. So what is your favorite commenting system? I do like LiveFyre as well and did use them for years, I would consider switching back at some point but am kind of tied into waiting for Disqus to pay out if I were to do that.