Centralized Commenting: Ripples of A New Era

In light of Google's changes to how they handle no-follow links (check out seomoz's video on this change), Andy Beard has posted an interesting suggestion for bloggers: switch to Disqus. Andy has a variety of reasons for suggesting Disqus, but the main reason that now is the time is because it places all of your comments in an external javascript file, which means that Google won't count all of the externally linking comments on your posts and thereby kill the flow of your Page Rank. I think it's likely that implementing Disqus or a similar centralized commenting system to prevent Google from crawling links in comments will become standard SEO procedure for blogs. In fact, I'm testing it out on my personal blog right now.

Because Disqus makes it easy for bloggers to setup Facebook Connect and other social media login systems on their sites, if Disqus or it's competitors start to see a large amount of new users, it's likely that Facebook Connect will also begin to see a very large increase in adoption. Therefore, the adoption of centralized commenting is likely to be one of many cornerstones for what Jeremiah Owyang calls the Era of Social Colonization, the period in which all sites become social.