SEO Mode

Disqus comments live in an iframe loaded by JavaScript, so search engines mostly can't see them. Lazy loading makes that worse: the thread only loads when someone scrolls or clicks, which a crawler never does.

SEO mode fixes that. Search engine bots never get the Disqus embed. Instead they get your theme's own WordPress comment list — filled with your Disqus comments by Comment Sync. People still get Disqus, lazy loaded as usual.

SEO mode is on by default. It needs nothing else to work, but without sync there are usually no WordPress comments to show crawlers.

• Set it up
• What bots see
• Page caching
• Load comments for search engine bots
• Customising
• Related

Set it up

1. Set up Comment Sync so new Disqus comments are copied into WordPress.
2. Run Sync past comments to bring in the comments you already have.
3. Leave Advanced → Load comments for search engine bots off (the default).

What bots see

Visitor	Gets
A person	The Disqus thread, loaded by your loading method
A search engine bot	Your theme's normal comments area, listing the approved WordPress comments — including every synced Disqus comment

A visitor counts as a bot when its user agent contains bot, crawl, slurp or spider — Googlebot, Bingbot, Yahoo Slurp, Baiduspider, YandexBot, DuckDuckBot, Applebot and similar — or when it sends no user agent at all.

Crawlers get the same comments people see on Disqus — only the format differs. Keep sync running so the two stay in step.

Page caching

SEO mode decides per request, which clashes with full-page caching. With a page cache, the first visitor to a page decides what's cached. If that was a bot — or a cache preloader that sends no user agent — people get the cached bot version: WordPress comments and no Disqus.

If you use a page cache (WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, LiteSpeed Cache, WP Super Cache, a host or CDN cache, …), you have two options:

1. Keep SEO mode, and exclude bots from the cache. Some caches can skip caching for bot user agents or keep a separate bot cache. This keeps SEO mode fully working.
2. Turn SEO mode off. Turn on Advanced → Load comments for search engine bots. Bots then get the Disqus embed like everyone else, so the cache is always safe — but crawlers no longer see your comments as indexable text.

Load comments for search engine bots

Panel: Advanced · Setting key: dcl_gnrl_options.dcl_caching · Default: 0 (off)

By default Disqus is hidden from crawlers. Turn this on if you use page caching, so cached pages still include the comments.

Off means SEO mode is on. On means SEO mode is off: bots are treated like people.

Customising

Developers can take full control of the decision with the dcl_can_load filter — for example to treat another user agent as a bot:

// Treat Facebook's link previewer like a search engine bot.
add_filter( 'dcl_can_load', function ( $can_load ) {
    $agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] ?? '';

    return false !== stripos( $agent, 'facebookexternalhit' ) ? false : $can_load;
} );

Related

• Comment Sync — what fills the WordPress comment list.
• Advanced — the other compatibility switches.