Take this word of friendly advice from someone who hasn’t invested money in a third-party commenting service. Maintain control of the comments on your site. Third-party commenting services like Disqus, coComment and Intense Debate always state that you retain ownership of your comments. That’s great but you really don’t retain control.

When you utilize a comment service the comments serve to build the Google juice of the sites whose services you are using. Those sites then encourage your commenters to join their services in order to get the most out of commenting. That’s annoying. You get functionality that provides a varying amount of added value depending on the blog platform you are using to publish.

The biggest value add that comment services purport to provide is threaded comments. That’s no big deal. The top three blogging platforms, WordPress, Movable Type and Drupal, all support threaded commenting either natively or via add-on modules. So you can have threaded comments without passing your comments to a third-party service.

The other big argument for using a comment service involves people’s ability to find your discussions. They argue that their sites will get a lot of traffic, people will find discussions about your blog posts and those people will then find your blog. This may be true to a certain extent. I also think it’s true that you will always get more traffic from Google searches (both native and blog specific ones) if you keep all the content on your blog as part of your site.

Certain very high traffic sites may benefit from the ability to have the server load and spam protection features transferred to the service rather than their own blog server. If that’s the case then why not just use WordPress.com, which provides both bandwidth and spam protection while allowing you to utilize your own domain?

These days I think that web publishers are way to flippant about scattering their content all over the web. Discussion about the things you are publishing is a very important part of the publishing and community building process. Off loading your blog’s comment system increases fragmentation and dilutes that value of the domains that you’ve been working so hard to build.

Disqus - After 5 Days on Disqus, I’m Turning Back to Wordpress Comments | RyanSpoon.com