Friday, November 4, 2011

Google Search Now Indexing Facebook Comments!

This one is a big news- Google is now indexing AJAX and JavaScript content. This means that the text from comments on Facebook pages will now show up in Google search results.

What Is The Big News?

The comments made on blogs and sites via the Facebook comments box are now being indexed by the search engine. As reported by Digital Inspiration, the Googlebots can now crawl comments made on web pages and can now read Facebook comments, just like any other text on the page. And when a search is made about the text of the comments, they will show up in the search results. Now, your comments made on a site through Facebook, are searchable via Google. This indexing stands clear for other commenting engines written in JavaScript like- Disqus and Intense Debate.

For example, see this comment made on TechCrunch-

Google Indexing FB Comments

And now a Google search of the comment that came up with the commentator's named queried.

Google Indexing FB Comments

Why The SEOs Are Happy With The News?

This is a great news for SEOs as till now, Google bots were not able to pick up comments made via systems such as Disqus, Facebook Comments, and Intense Debate as they could not read text within iFrame coding. Consequently, the blog commenting done by SEOs did not give any search boosts to their websites. But now that Google has started indexing Facebook comments using Googlebots the text posted in those comment boxes will now be visible in Google search.

Google has confirmed the move. The head of Google’s Webspam team, Matt Cutts, sent out a Tweet and confirmed the news on Twitter:

Googlebot keeps getting smarter. Now has the ability to execute AJAX/JS to index some dynamic comments.”

Matt Cutts - Google Indexing FB Comments

The news has spread like wildfire on the internet, and among internet marketers, and Google has been quoted as saying, "What you're seeing is a result of Google increasingly being able to crawl JavaScript and AJAX content. We have steadily been increasing our ability to index richer content such as JavaScript/AJAX. If users can see something in their browser, our goal is to be able to index that content irrespective of its language or format."

Now, commenting through third party engines will lead to SEO boost, as opposed to earlier when commenting engines like Disqus, Facebook or Intense Debate could not be crawled by the search bots. As a blog or website admin, these commenting platforms were quite convenient to enable commenting, and tackle spam. But they were useless for SEO purposes. However, now that Google bots can read AJAX and JavaScript, the comments and commentator's name are finding place in search results.

The Privacy Concern For The Common Users:

The delight of SEOs aside, Google indexing their comments may not seem that exciting to users. Most users guard their privacy against Google by upping their Facebook privacy on their profiles, but now, their names and comments will show up via Facebook Comments on blogs. This sort of backdoor entry for Google may not be appreciated by people.

People may not like their online commenting activities being indexed by Google and their names coming up in search results. What remains to be seen is how Facebook will react to this? What will it do to protect the users' privacy, is being watched by the industry experts now.

The Takeaway Tip For SEOs:
Now, Facebook Comments come in various formats like-XFBML and HTML5. After several tests, it has been observed that you must comment with the XFBML implementation, as it is what that is showing in search results.

Source: http://www.pagetrafficbuzz.com/google-search-indexing-facebook-comments/11997/

1 comment:

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