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Using Facebook Comments to Improve Google Search Rankings

When Facebook launched the ability to embed Facebook comments on third-party websites, a lot of publishers saw it as a great

advantage: not only would it improve traffic by exposing their content to others on the social network, but Facebook’s “real names”

policy would also cut down on trolling and bad behavior. And some newspaper and media sites have seen a big traffic boost from

implementing Facebook comments — including mainstream media companies like Los Angeles Times, which has credited Facebook

with improving its web results and Huffington Post. It’s worth remembering however that Facebook is not the cure for bad

comments, and that handing over comments means relinquishing control over something important.

Using Facebook Comments

Many small businesses have utilized Facebook comments to their business blogs. In last two months, it was confirmed that

Googlebots, or the spiders that crawl web pages, are now reading Facebook comments on websites just like any other text content

and the more interesting part is that you can also search the text of these comments using regular Google search. Google uses

comments to determine how influential an article is and thus losing out on comments may mean a lot for any blogger. So, one may

consider alternate commenting options say for example Akismet plugin for wordpress.

But labnol.org reports that, "some of these commenting engines are implemented in JavaScript and hence search engines may not be

able to read /index the comments that visitors are writing on your web pages”.

When you leave intelligent comments on your industry-related blogs, Facebook could know who carries a high reputation on certain

type of content. Seeing the possible implications of Facebook commenting, as a blogger, one should think of the advantages it has

been proven of. It can certainly add value to readers as the comments become more meaningful for group of readers related on

Facebook. Commenting on all relevant Facebook posts may be very time-consuming, and you may think of hiring a Social Media

manager or Virtual Assistant who can work on your behalf.

Facebook as a commenting platform offers a huge tool to create and maintain reputation for any professional or business site. You

may not want to add Facebook Comments to your blog, but, you can certainly use Facebook Comments to comment on other blogs

which you like.

Real names can also exclude valuable viewpoints

Virtues of anonymity both when it comes to reader comments and elsewhere — such as at Facebook and Google+, both of these

pursue a real-name policy despite the obvious impact it does so has on dissidents and other marginalized groups. Although removing

anonymity (or pseudonymity) can remove some of the trolling and flame-wars that consume comment threads, it also risks removing

opinions and viewpoints that would never be expressed if the commenter had to put their name on it. There are any number of valid

reasons why someone wouldn’t want to do this.

Choosing Facebook Comments for Search Rankings

Integrating Facebook comments can provide a traffic boost for publishers and other websites, simply because the social network is so

huge. In fact, in case of the Huffington Post, it has credited Facebook integration with generating a huge amount of traffic and

comments — the site said that within just a few months of implementing Facebook Connect logins, it saw the number of comments

almost double and traffic from Facebook climbed by 500 percent. This kind of boost is like a reward that the network uses to

convince publishers that Facebook comments are worth offering.

In the long run, handing comments over to Facebook increases traffic, but it could also make it easier for publishers to simply ignore

their comments and not engage as much as they would have otherwise. As Facebook is somewhat 'handling them', it's a little like a

retailer outsourcing their customer service to an outside firm. It might take a frustrating element of the business off their plate, but it

also hands control of a crucial element of customer interaction over to a third party.

But the bottom line of all this is that when publishers feel attracted to the traffic and authority that Facebook offers with comments,

they should be sure to think about better Google search rankings and what they are giving up as well.