Comment on Stallion Responsive SEO Theme Layout Options by SEO Dave.

WordPress 2 Column Layouts The IntenseDebate comment plugin includes the features you are thinking about.

Unfortunately using a plugin like IntenseDebate means you loose control over the layout/formatting of your comments since your comments are stored on another site. For example you’d loose the Stallion comment titles and the Stallion SEO Super Comments links to the super comments and those are two very useful SEO features.

You do keep a copy of the comment in your WordPress database and search engines and users with javascript turned off do see your themes version of the comments, but the comment is replicated via user profiles on the IntenseDebate website which could be a duplicate content issue (not looked at the format enough to know for sure).

As a Stallion theme user I wouldn’t install the IntenseDebate comments plugin, if you have a well commented site you’ll loose long tail SERPs related to the comment titles because you and your users won’t see the comment title form.

I’ve given this comment the title:

WordPress Comment Plugin IntenseDebate Review

I know it’s not really a review :-) but, there’s a good chance when this comment is indexed it will rank for that SERP because of the Stallion themes super comments feature. Probably not a high traffic SERP (didn’t check), but even if it generates 5 visitors a month it’s 5 visitors this site wouldn’t receive if I moved to the IntenseDebate plugin.

If you could find a plugin like IntenseDebate that directly uses the comments from the WordPress database (no external site) might be possible to incorporate it into Stallion. That being said as you touched on in your other comment having user profiles is a slippery slope for link SPAMMERs and potential duplicate content issues. For example if this was my only comment and it was added to a user profile like you see with the IntenseDebate plugin there would be the Stallion SEO Super Comments version of this comment and the user profile page with only this comment = duplicate content. You have to be careful reusing the same content because of duplicate content issues.

David