Let's talk about Facebook Comments!

[MarieHaynes]

Have you seen Jen's post on the SEO Blog today about Facebook?  I am really interested in testing out Facebook comments.  Are any of you guys using them?

Here are my thoughts:

Benefits:

• Will make it easy for people to comment (assuming they have a facebook account)
• Their comments are shared on their wall and on their friends' news feeds so you could potentially get a LOT of exposure and traffic.

Potential Drawbacks:

• Who controls the content?  If facebook decides to pull this feature will we lose all of our comments?
• What is the moderation like?  Do I get to approve which comments are posted?
• Some people may be reluctant to comment if they know that their friends are going to see what they wrote.

What do you guys think?  Are you going to use FB comments?

[EGOL]

My concerns about this are...  1) Can search engines see the content?... and 2) what does moderation involve?

Here is what I found on the Facebook site about crawlability... (at this URL)

The Facebook comments box is rendered in an iframe on your page, and most search engines will not crawl content within an iframe. However, you can access all the comments left on your site via the graph API as described above. Simply grab the comments from the API and render them in the body of your page behind the comments box. We recommend you cache the results, as pulling the comments from the graph API on each page load could slow down the rendering time of the page.

For moderation... I am thinking that this will be another problem. Compared to allowing comments via wordpress this has the ability to send the comments out to a lot of people who use facebook.  Huge upside there.

But I still will probably not use it because moderating the comments would pull me away from jobs that I feel are more important and that I would rather do.  .... but that is just my perspective. May work much better for other people.