Facebook Comments

[tylerfraser]

Hello,

We get tons of comments on Facebook about our blog. We get no comments on our actual blog. So I'm really leaning towards putting facebook comments to replace my blogs comments - http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/13/series-a-whopper-benchmark-invests-33m-in-new-bi-company-domo/

I was looking at techcrunch's code and it looks like none of that information is actually being consider content on their site.

The code looks like:

Even with tons of comments. So I am thinking that a huge amount of facebook comments does nothing for your onsite SEO. You get no more content and nothing is changing on your page, despite even an unprecedented amount of conversation. Perhaps the only thing you would get from this is the off site SEO - which would be traffic and exposure on facebook.

I'm not asking if I should do this or not. I'm really asking: do you agree with what I said above.

Thanks

Tyler

[john4math]

You can get Facebook comments to be indexable by search engines!  There was an SEOMoz blog post about it not that long ago at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/make-facebook-comments-box-indexable-by-search-engines.  If that's the only thing holding you back, it sounds like you don't have much to lose in trying it out!

[tylerfraser]

Facebook posts might be indexable, but they won't be seen on that page. And even if they are indexed on Facebook, there's no seo for the actual page. The thing I would lose is a bad strategy. Im at a cross roads - promote proper comments or install Facebook.

[Francisco_Meza]

Tyler, I'm glad you posted this because I was thinking the same thing. I about 3 months I got 150 likes and about 60 shares. My blog can't even do that by itself. I will be replacing it with the Facebook comments. There is more activity. I think this is the code: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/comments/

[heatherrobinson]

My understanding is that by using the script given in the post that John mentions above, the comments are crawlable as it removes them from the iframe and places them on the page as html - so Googlebot sees what the user sees.

Unless I miss understood the post?

[john4math]

I think the point of the article was that you can serve the actual Facebook comments you get from this script on the page when GoogleBot crawls it, so the actual comments will be on the page and you can get the SEO benefits from the comments. Excerpt:

I was amazed by the simplicity of the code and that no authentication is needed. If you'll examine the code you'll also see that the comments can be styled easily to fit any site's layout. So basically you can now use Facebook Comments Box on your site and serve GoogleBot (or any other crawler/browser agent) with the comments to have them crawled & indexed. Obviously this won't be considered as cloaking as you're serving Google exactly what the users see (just like creating an HTML version for a Flash website).

[RyanKent]

Great information John. Thanks for the details.

[tylerfraser]

No the comments are not part of the page's code. They may be crawlable on facebook, but are not on your site. See for yourself: view-source:http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/13/series-a-whopper-benchmark-invests-33m-in-new-bi-company-domo/

I will say that I have been told two different things about whether google can see what is in an iframe and if it gets attributed to your site. I guess the answer to this is really what I'm looking for.

@john, didn't you read the cons:

1. Posts are not crawlable as they are loaded in an iFrame

So that's it, I think the answer has come. You get ZERO on page optimization from facebook comments, even if you receive an unprecedented amount of conversation.

[Francisco_Meza]

Tyler, I am implementing this one my site right now. I'll get back to you on this and everyone following this post. I gave you a thumbs up because your question led me to a valuable feature.

[john4math]

If you can display the contents of the comments on a page you host, as given in the blog post, there's nothing stopping you from displaying those on a the page below your blog post when the GoogleBot is viewing it.

The implementation should result in a set up where the page for your regular viewers has the blog post, and the iframe with facebook comments.  The page you serve to the GoogleBot (or any search crawler) will have the blog post, but then HTML with the comments, as generated by the script mentioned in the SEOMoz post I linked to prior.

The con he mentioned is what the post was solving.  I believe it's true that content in an iframe will not be indexed with the page it resides on, but in this case, you can get the content out of the iframe, and load it onto your own page.

[Francisco_Meza]

I need everyone's opinion on this feature. I opened a discussion here using Facebook Comments:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/i-need-a-super-quick-review-for-a-single-webpage-i-intergrated-facebook-comments-in-an-iframe-on-the-page

[tylerfraser]

So coming from a stellar individual: http://www.seomoz.org/users/profile/215975

That this is better for seo: http://disqus.com/
example: http://garyvaynerchuk.com/post/7396143247/the-twitter-at-system-do-you-understand-it

I've seen this before and implemented it. My only issue is that you are adding a significant amount of links to your page with this.

Have a look at the code of a page that uses disqus: view-source:http://garyvaynerchuk.com/post/7396143247/the-twitter-at-system-do-you-understand-it

[Francisco_Meza]

Tyler, that disqus source code does have a lot of links. I am comparing the two right now (Disqus and FB Comments) and I think they are BOTH great. I may stick to FB comments because I can limit the number of viewable post. If I get too many replies using Discus, I don't want people to get confused and have lower conversions. 30% of my customers are outside the US and have bad English. BOTH sloutions are great, but in my specific case, FB comments are better in my case.  If it was a blog, then it would be a whole different story!  Thanks for the discuss link!

[prima-253509]

Can anyone confirm that google actually sees all of the comments by disqus? I turned javascript off on the page and about half of the comments disappeared (the http://garyvaynerchuk.com/post/7396143247/the-twitter-at-system-do-you-understand-it example). About the only thing that showed up was the "so and so likes this" and "so and so re-blogged this" none of the actual comments appear to show up. I know it is not an iframe but the content is still being written to the page via javascript, so I am wondering if Google and other crawlers can actually access it. Any thoughts?

[Francisco_Meza]

I would check the source code. That would tell you for sure.

[prima-253509]

If you mean viewing the source of the page and the actual html elements that is what I did. With Javascript turned on all of the html elements show up. With it turned off they don't, thus much of it is being written via javascript.

Instant preview on that page from the google serps does not show all of the comments, just the likes. However the cached version of the page does show all of the comments, but it must be some sort of screen capture because the majority of the comments do not show up when viewing the source of the cached page.

So not sure that really confirms anything. I guess to find out you might have to do a controlled test.