Google indexing Facebook Comments behind Iframes
Google is displaying some interesting behavior and is indexing Facebook comments even though they are behind a javascript loaded iframe.
The comments don’t appear in the text only cache but are showing up when you search for strings of text from the comments.
I’ve been searching for a few comments from techcrunch and they are not ranking very well. Certainly not as well as I would expect for such a powerful site.
Facebook previously said that users needed to use the Facebook Graph API to pull comments in if they wanted them to be indexed which resulted in a nice plugin being developed for WordPress.
Post category: Google, Search Engine Optimisation Tweet
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
Read the 13 comments below, or add your own!
Its another chapter in the war between Google and Facebook…
Does this really matter? Or is it just an annoying thing for searchers?
Well it has been said at some point that iframes and Javascript were hard to index for the search engines, hence try to minimize the use. So has the search engines become smarter? it certainly looks that way. Which is quite interesting SEO wise
Yes search engines are getting smarter, Matt Cutts tweeted about this on his profile.
https://twitter.com/#!/mattcutts/status/131425949597179904
It certainly matters if you have a page receiving hundreds of on topic facebook comments… That’s free user generated content that’s relatively spam-free.
This is quite interesting from an SEO approach Michael. I’ve always stayed away from iFrames for that reason.
They are also indexing Disqus comments so I heard….
I hope people will not misuse this opportunity, that Google provide the SEO Community. It will lost its value, if the Spammers overdosed it.
Mmm, I am in two minds about testing facebook comments for the whole waste of SEO space reason. But … they do help with spam filtering via the auto-real-identity aspect of it all. Any more stories on this theme please let me know!
No doubt that Google gets better all the time. Facebook and Twitter indexing is essential for Google to be updated all the time. Google also recently started reading through javascripts, previously not scanned them at all
Thanks for the info… I’ll give it a try.
Thats it, i´ll turn to facebook comments fast enuff
Its been a big talking point as social and search meet. With FB comments being so widely use it was essential for them to start indexing the content.