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Google Indexing Facebook Comments

matt cutts confirms google indexing facebook comments

matt cutts confirms google indexing facebook commentsFacebook Comments system, Disqus comments, and other similar commenting systems can enhance the end-user’s experience by decreasing comment spam and allowing users to utilize one login across multiple sites. However, although these comment systems provide site owners and users with some benefits, search engines have had difficulty crawling and indexing the comments due to the JavaScript and AJAX. Since the popular commenting systems, which normally deliver comments within an IFRAME, made comments “invisible” to the bots, the comments were not indexed or displayed in the search engine results page.

However, it was recently discovered that if a comment is dynamically loaded via AJAX or Javascript, the Googlebot now has the ability to read the comment. Amit Agarwal, a technology columnist and founder of Digital Inspiration, wrote the following:

“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.”

Matt Cutts, a principal engineer and the head of the webspam team at Google, tweeted the following yesterday afternoon confirming earlier reports that the Googlebot could now “read” AJAX and JavaScript:

“GoogleBot keeps getting smarter. Now has the ability to execute AJAX/JS to index some dynamic comments.”

Due to the GoogleBot’s inability to process and execute the AJAX and JavaScript in the past, a large percentage of webmasters have avoided using some of the most popular commenting systems. These webmasters, who were concerned that the user-generated comments would not appear in the search results, may want to reconsider the best commenting system for their site and visitors in light of this recent development.

[Sources Include: Twitter, Digital Inspiration, Business 2.0 Press]

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David Angotti SmokyMountains.com

After successfully founding and exiting an educational startup in 2009, I began helping companies with business development, search engine marketing ...

Google Indexing Facebook Comments

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