Dear SEO friends,
Recently I considered implementing the Facebook Comments Box in several sites. I tried to consider the pros and cons.
The obvious pros were (there are more):
- By default comments will be posted to the user's wall (though they can disable this), which can potentially create a lot of organic traffic and buzz.
- Fight spam as the user need a Facebook account to post a comment, which help fight agains most eviil spam bots out there (not to mention Facebook is at your side to stop the spammers as you can report the account and assist having it blocked).
- Facebook implemented a ranking algorithm that promotes comments which are more valuable
The two obvious cons were (there are more):
- Users need a Facebook account to post a comment
- Posts are not crawlable as they are loaded in an iFrame
The first one is an issue no doubt (for some more than others), but the second one is the critical one as far as I'm concerned. I almost gave up of the whole idea but after long researching I found a very valuable comment by a guy who identified himself as an engineer on the Facebook Platform team when asked about the crawlability of the comments. The guy said that there is a way to export the comments for any given URL with the help of a simple script (can be done in multiple programming languages). I don't know why didn't this make waves in the SEO world as I know that it's a common belief that Facebook comments aren't indexable and that they are closed behind the "Facebook walled Garden".
Here is a link to the script the guy offered (in PHP): https://www.rayhe.net/fb/comments.phps
Here is the resulting output of the script: https://www.rayhe.net/fb/comments.php
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).
One important point, I noticed that not all the comments are exported. Seems that for URLs with many comments (100s or 1,000s) only part of the comments are exported using the supplied code. It may be a bug or something by design, anyway, this requires more research.
Don't know about you, but this made me smile. I hope you'll find this useful as well, at least I think that now using Facebook comments is much more appealing.
Cheers,
Roy
P.S,
This of course opens the door for a lot of black hat SEO tricks, I'll let your imagination go wild :-)
Note from Jen: We got a lot of comments last week on our post about Facebook Marketing Tactics You Might Not Know About asking about Facebook comments. Hopefully this helps answer some of those questions. :)
Oh, My, God! This is EXACTLY what I need! :) Thank, YOU, SO, MUCH!
Great post - thanks for sharing. I rather enjoy non-iframe content... seems to make everything work a little bit better!
Thanks. Yea, just "a bit" better :-)
Is it possible to make the links to the FB user profiles nofollow?
Obsolutely, you simply parse the comments with an XML/DOM parser and edit whatever you want, add attributes, etc...
Thanks for the reply Roy, I'll look into the mechanics of implementing your suggestion.
woooooooo
So we're able to pull the comments of any site with FaceBook commenting installed? If this is the case, then this is pretty big. There is a wealth of UNIQUE (because it hasn't been indexed before) user generated content that is not being indexed right now!
Yup. Imagine the black hat opportunities.... Taking over someone elses comments...
Unique content jackpot! Also how much it can be highjack on another website without any credentials is "a bit" scary :-)
I ported this code to C# for you .Net developers out there. Contact me if interested, eventually I'll post to git. @lucasjans
Lucas,
I would appreciate that c# code. Thanks
Can you send me the c# code as well?
Can you send me the c# code as well?
Thx!
Once someone writes a WordPress plugin, everyone will be using this knowledge! Great find, thanks for sharing.
Abosolutely! The first one to develop a plugin will win the jackpot. The race is on.
Ok, serveral hours and I've done it ;) Have fun
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/crawlable-facebook-comments/
Thx Zelawk!! great contribution!...just thinking about when would anyone have the time to develop a WP plugin....and here you are! ... thx!...I'm going to try to implement in a couple of blogs we have :)
I'm realy looking for some thoughts and ideas for improvement. Thanks in advance!
I'm loving this plugin! Thanks Zewlak!
And editing the CSS to make the box fit on my site made me feel like a web developer for a moment. ... Just a moment, though.
Hello,
I'm getting an error,
Fatal error: Cannot redeclare pr_comment() (previously declared in /xx/xx/xxx/wp-content/plugins/crawlable-facebook-comments/crawlable-facebook-comments.php:66) in /home/xxx/xxx/wp-content/plugins/crawlable-facebook-comments/crawlable-facebook-comments.php on line 66
could you please help me out?
thanks
Seems like you are trying to call load_comments() function twice in your template.
Hello zewlak, it looks like it's not working anymore. Do you know what happened?
That's what I was thinking. I'm sure someone will develop a plugin pretty soon since more and more people want to include Facebook comments.
The cons is the uses needs to have a facebook account to comment on the blog, in my opinion its kind affair who didn’t want real people to comment on the blog and let the link juice suckers go away? I think it’s good that the comment box really wants to you login to facebook 1st.
I actually give up the idea of adding a facebook comment box on the blog and added the disqus because of the iframe thing (Thanks for that)
I need to know one more thing and that is moderation, can we put moderation on comments? I mean is there a way to add moderation on comments? (Would love if you answer!~)
Yes you can moderate comments. Just implemented the Facebook Comments on recipe site https://www.Italyum.com So far so good. Have not gone the whole hog with serving the comments to Spiders as suggested in this post. So far the comments are not of a high enough quality or quantity to worry about.
Moderation is a built in feature of the Comment Box. Not related to this solution.
This. Is. Amazing.
Is it bad that my mind immediately came up with 3 black hat techniques that could be done out of this?
Anyway, yeah. Work to get this implemented will begin this afternoon for sure. Thanks so much for sharing!
Thanks! With the amount of people who now want to add Facebook comments to their sites, this could be really useful. Will have to get this feature up and running in ASP!
I'd love to get an ASP version of this also. Anyone?? Anyone??
I may create a wordpress plugin if there's enough people interested. I can't promise it for this week though
A plugin to make the comments indexable? I'm interested!
No doubt about the fact that people here would be really interested in this plugin. Anyway, I'm totally in if someone create one. Like Roy said, who would be the first one to create it? Good luck Ricardo!
So far I was able to make it, but I have couple of issues to solve. First: The current script from Facebook it list the form + comments. So I need to stop listing the Facebook comments, because we are generating the comments the script in this post. The second issue: I want to insert the comments also in wordpress. This way, if you deactivate the Facebook comments in the future, you don't lose the comments. Like disqus does. I'll be reading more about it.
Check out my plugin Crawlable Facebook Comments. I've been thinking about making iframe specified height (to display only comment box, and cut the comments).
I'm installing it right now. I was able to make it, the only thing I still couldn't do was to insert the comment in Wordpress.
Thank's for the article.
For thoose who are using Contao (CMS), I have developped a module to integrate it simply and easily.
It's integrated in the following page: https://www.evizer.com/commentaires-facebook.html
I justed added the facebook comments plugin to our company website. I also set it up so that when a comment is left on the site an email will be sent to me using the different functionality that comes with the comments plugin. However, it seems that lately the googlebot keeps triggering this function. So every time that google crawls the site, I get an email saying a comment has been left. I haven't been able to find anything else online about this so thought I'd ask here. Has this happened to anyone else and any ideas on how to fix it? Thanks!
Great blog Roy!! I was thinking on this point day before yesterday. Your post really helped me. Wish you all the best in futures :-)
Thanks, happy you found it useful.
I managed to render the facebook comments on my blog through the Facebook API (the way Facebook explains on their social plugins page), but the fetched comments are displayed with <pre> tags below the fb comments box now. Not really what I wanted. How can I render the comments BEHIND the comments box and avoid cloaking? Any help is appreciated!
Me too ;-)
Thanks for the post it is really good stuff to read.
Hi how can i use this on wordpress??? please help me
Agreed, this needs to happen. I do however think that people are less likely to comment via a fb comment box.. People don't want their flippant comments published on their facebook wall.
It has a checkbox to not post in your wall.
any WP plguin ??how to use this PHP code in WP ??
Truely awesome... I did not figure this possible. Thanks a lot for sharing Roy! :-)
This is great! We have been looking for somthing like this. Excited to try it out!
I would love to show a feed in my website using this. The formatting looks a little like Facebook. This should be a MozCon presentation.
cool post
i am new one so don know much abt it. this comment about what? if i want to get all comment in my wall or my page what should i do? and i want to short the comment also.
Thx
Best Regard.
This is a good solution for some. I have considered it, but have decided against it for my own personal use. I would rather not have outbound links from my website to a ton of Facebook profiles. Many reasons but first and foremost you have no control over the content on that profile that you're linking to. Specifically, you can't control who or what those individuals link to from that profile (think spam, scam, gambling, etc.).
On the flip side, whether you link to them or not, you still have the inbound link to your page from Facebook. For that reason I think the default implementation is perfection for its ability to generate one way inbound links. Change to the PHP script method and you're now using reciprocal linking.
I view the default script implementation as being what blog comments should have always been, but weren't. Now people can leave whatever goofball comment they want on a page, they can even put links in the comments. But unlike traditional blog comments, there's little concern about people doing blog spam for backlinks. :)
I've put together a sample photo discussion website to experiment with the feature a little bit. If you're interested, take a look: https://www.like-it-or-leave-it.com
Facebook allows you to control what is published... so you can avoid any uncontroled publication.
about the back link, you can simply modify the script to avoid linking unknow person.
Hi,
Nice information, really hepful. thanks for sharing this.
Thanks
brainshakers Interactive [hyperlink removed]
i have fb social plugin with moderation implemented at the moment.
is there a way to move to this implementation without loosing my actual comments ?
thx
Not sure what you mean by "social plugin", facebook offers many social plugins.
If you have FB comment box than you won't lose anything. In any case, this workaround is about data presentation, it doesn't change the data (comments) itself.
Thank you for sharing Roy. Some of the things I'm thinking about: It sure is a concern that to leave a comment visitors have to have a FB acct. Even if they do, they may not want to connect it to their comments elsewhere.
I agree with you, but as you can now export the comments, you can also offer other means to comment on your site and mash everything together. Some will use FB, some Twitter and some might choose anonymous commenting. A bit of work, but doable.
Second time around, great article Roy, and great conversation Mozzers.
I will nofollow the links (still investigating xml/dom parsers, thanks Roy;) to conserve link juice while safeguarding against possible association to a bad Facebook user (spammy, porn?).
I Will definitely want the comments parsed; thanks again Roy.
Mark Stegman.
SEO Ohio
"Seems that for URLs with many comments (100s or 1,000s) only part of the comments are exported using the supplied code"
Have you checked which comments are exported in such cases, i.e. only those that were "liked" at least by one person? Perhaps it's the way to choose only the best comments.
Very interesting, I'll have to try this out too--I have several clients who have social media marketing as well as SEO, so integrating Facebook comments seems like a no-brainer. Thanks!
Good info, the only problem I can see is if Facebook makes some changes to block non iframe versions.
It is like in the past where they bring out a new product then every one finds these nice little tricks with them to assist internet marketing, then all of a sudden they block it all.
I think this is to their best interest to keep it open (it's a solution provided by a Facebook engineer). If they won't they will surely offer another solution. SEO is a big deal these days, if this feature is what they need to increase the Comment Box adaptation its well worth it.
Will it help me to include my comments in real time search?
Excellent Script. Many thanks for sharing. I am going to implement this on all my sites soon. Love that it can be styled as you want it as well and don't have to stick with the facebook default. Gives a more custom feel.
Really appreciate the find. Love new API's and Snippets of Code.
Glad you found it useful :-)
This is an awesome piece of inforamtion. I agree with the confusion as to why this has ot caused a bigger buzz in the SEO world. But those who can use it should especially if Have a strong presence on FaceBook. Sounds like a great tool for reputaion management as well! :-0)
If this works, this is an absolute god send. I've been looking for such a solution for a few days now, after the whole iFrame issue was highlighted to me.
Good find!
As I said in the post, I have no idea how come this solution wasn't picked up earlier by the SEO community. It was a needle in a haystack.
That said, a quick Google did reveal this:
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.
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/comments/
I'm not sure if this was there went I sent the post to SEOmoz (more than 5 weeks ago). I checked the page and don't think I saw it there, maybe I missed it. It surely helps that they added the info to their page. Thanks for pointing this out. In any case, as a code snippet I still think the post is helpful.
Thanks for the post. I'm still trying to figure out Disqus's facebook implementation and whether or not it is as good (same amount of potential Facebook traffic) as Facebook's version.
Kinda on the fence between the two, but we'll see how my experiment goes on my photo site.
Excellent. Please keep us posted. I'm about to implement this in one of my high profile sites as well. I'll be sure to update you guys on the impact.
I'm in that same boat... We implemented the Disqus system on one of our sites a few months ago because visitors could log in with FB or Twitter, and figured the benefits would be similar or the the same. After reading this I'm not so sure though, as comments don't appear to get posted to user's walls or to their Twitter page.
Seriously considering switching to the FB script...
Thanks Roy.
Awesome actually. I have great UGC conversations going and the testimonial and reviews happening on FB are off the charts. Now I can add the Facebook conversations to the website.
Will this script pull the conversation from the Facebook page or is it only for comments left on my website from a FB comment box.
Great Research!
At least from my experiment it only worked on FB comments, not wall posts from FB pages.
good
This can open plenty of doors. I was testing facebook comments on one of my blogs last week, after the post here, and for several reasons I decided to wait, one of them being the iframe issue. If I do manage to solve a few more issues regarding my site personally, with this opportunity I will sure add Facebook comments.
is it possible to add in wordpress somehow?
Yes, but it will require coding knowledge. PHP and HTML/CSS primarily. You need to be able to dig into the various root elements of your theme, and especially be able to change the comments.php template file.
Sadly there isn't any sort of plugin I'm aware of that would be able to get this done for you.
Facebook Comments for WordPress (https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facebook-comments-for-wordpress/) includes the option to Hide WordPress comments on posts/pages where Facebook commenting is enabled. Now, editing it to make the comments indexable is another thing.
This is a good find! Thanks for the walk through for the non-technical folks. This can be uber helpful, especially if someone figures out how to get ALL of the comments indexed.
What about Disqus? I need to choose between either facebook comments or Disqus. Anyone has experience with it? Is it easier to integrate / pull the comments from?
Great - added to my to do list!
Can anyone explain how to insert the code to work the comments?. I inserted the code as it appears on the link and does not work. Is it necessary to raise more somefile to work?. If someone has tested on its website, please tell us how to do
I have coments in https://www.verfotosde.org
Great post. I've tinkered with facebook comment boxes in the past, but never worked out a way of getting the content loaded into my own stylesheets and make it indexable (as well as easily w3c verified (bit of an OCD thing of mine)).
Always good to know the facebook developers are finding ways to assist other web developers to utilise the full potential of its applications.
Thanks very much for the info.
I could be wrong - but you don't need a Facebook account - I put it on a website and in incognito mode it allows posting via Yahoo / Hotmail and AOL ... Not sure how it works for these accounts ...
Hey, anyone out there with this running on a URL we can take a look at? Facebook comments are certainly a useful feature for stimulating discussion between your FB wall and the site so can drive traffic and interaction between facebook and your site.
Interesting find! :)
I second that. I want to see a live site using this comment box. This should be presented at MozCon.
Jeremywebb from above integrates FB comments nicely @ https://www.Italyum.com
Read the conversation;)
hello
u r the best..:-)
Whatever which is well optimized with keyword,Google will take it for its indexing though its comment box.
Man, I couldn't agree more with this post.
It's been a while since I truly enjoyed an article as much as yours. Your unique content is very informative and engaging to the reader. We are of like mind.