Are Facebook Comments Worth the SEO Tradeoff?

If you’ve paid attention in your time online, you’ve probably noticed that there are only a small handful of ways to comment on a blog post.  Some blogs disable comments entirely.  Some use WordPress and use the default comments system, with or without a spam filter like Akismet installed.  Some use Disqus to dynamically load comments.  Many, however, use the Facebook comments plugin.

The Benefits of Facebook’s Comments Plugin

Facebook’s comments have a few notable benefits when used on your blog.  For one thing, it’s incredibly easy to install on pretty much any blog.  It also, obviously enough, comes with Facebook integration; users commenting on your page are more likely to like your page as well, since they’re already using Facebook to interact with your blog.

When a user posts a comment on one of your posts, their comment often shows up on their Facebook wall.  This can help you generate some additional organic traffic, as the friends of that user see the post and their friend’s comment.  The user can choose to turn this off, if they don’t want their comments made public, but not everyone does.

Facebook’s comments plugin also helps minimize spam and trolling comments on your blog.  Spam is cut simply because you have Facebook patrolling their account database and removing spammer accounts and fake users.  Trolling comments are minimized because many would-be trolls are hesitant to make their inflammatory comments when their name – and possibly information – is publicly available.

Using the Facebook comments plugin also gives you several configuration options.  You can use a replica of Facebook’s news feed, which analyzes the timeliness and engagement of your comments and organizes them according to relevance.  You can also organize comments in chronological order, to keep the most temporally relevant comments on top.

Facebook Comments and SEO

Facebook has one notable issue, and that’s the SEO aspect of comments.  Specifically, Facebook’s comments plugin is rendered in an iframe that loads dynamically, out of sync with the rest of your site.  Facebook comments appear when a user scrolls to their area on the page, and they display according to your settings – from a user point of view.  From the point of view of the search engine, there’s nothing but an empty box in place.

Well, that’s not strictly true.  In actuality, Facebook’s comments are perfectly visible to Google.  The thing is, Google doesn’t like indexing anything in an iframe and tying it directly to the site, because an iframe typically loads content from a different site entirely.  In this case, the comments on your page are loaded from Facebook.  Facebook is relatively trustworthy, but in other instances of iframe usage, it is often abused.

So, as such, Google indexes few if any Facebook comments on a blog, by default.  As far as Google is concerned, it may as well treat the comments section as a blank white box.

There’s also an issue brought up by Blind Five Year Old, about comment reputation.  Facebook is able to analyze the comments you make and can draw syntax, sentiment and meaning from those comments.  Further, they can trace the topic of the sites you made those comments on in the first place.  Facebook could potentially collate that data and determine organically who are the most active public authorities in certain niches using Facebook comments.

There’s a lot of potential, both for use and abuse, with this much information.  Facebook has yet to leverage most of it, but it looms, possible for the future.

The Solution to the SEO Problem

If you were to experiment, you might find that when you perform a search for the content of a comment left via Disqus, you would see that the comment is indexed perfectly by Google and leads back, not to some Disqus hub, but to the page the comment was posted on.  Disqus dynamically loads the same way Facebook’s comments do, in an iframe.  What makes Disqus special, while Facebook is left behind in indexing?

The answer is that Disqus is a third party with full control over their database of comments.  They use this control to build a foundation in on their comments plugin.  Whenever you post a comment through disqus, it’s set aside in a database.  The plugin displays it normally for users, but it also creates and populates an invisible hidden div behind the comments plugin.  This invisible hidden div holds the text and comment information of your post, and displays it specifically for the search engines.

This sort of hidden text is normally a huge negative warning sign for Google.  Hiding text and displaying it only for the search engines is a black hat technique and can earn your site a manual penalty.  However, that’s typically only when the content displayed is different than the content on the page for users.  In the case of Disqus, the content of the comments is the same for users in the iframe and for the search engines in the div.  Google, of course, is smart enough to recognize that this is not an attempt to game the search engines; rather it is an attempt to make the search engines sync more with the actual content and display of the page.

Facebook doesn’t do any of this automatically.  Fortunately, you can force it to do something similar

PHP for Solving Problems

When this issue first came up, an engineer claiming to be part of the Facebook platform released some PHP code into the wild.  The code can be found here, in source file form.  You can use this code to draw in and create a database of the data found in the Facebook comments.  This includes profile picture, name, date and time of the comment, and the comment content.  You can see a sample of the data it compiles by using the test set up by that same engineer here.

You can’t just throw this code onto your side and let it be, however.  You need to set up the code to display within a hidden div, similar to how Disqus works.

Note: using scripts like this, particularly within hidden divs, can be dangerous.  Many black hat techniques do the same thing, and if you start doing something with those scripts other than assisting the search engine, you’re going to run into penalties and problems.  Be careful with what you implement.

So, to return to the question in the title.  Is the Facebook comments plugin worth the SEO tradeoff?  The answer is generally yes, with one caveat.  It’s entirely up to you whether you use the Facebook comments plugin or Disqus.  Facebook offers more social integration and benefits, but requires more configuration.  Disqus is much more likely to just work.