UPDATE: you can continue using Facebook comments because from November 2011 , Matt Cutts from Google tweeted and confirmed that now Google spiders are even smarter and can Index comments on plugins by Facebook, Disqus and Intense Debate. I thank our dear readers for informing us.
Who can expect Traffic From it?
To be precise only those sites can be entertained which have large FB fan following. Whenever someone leaves a comment using Facebook plugin, his friends are notified via his wall about this activity. The probability that his friends will click the link to check your site is dependent on the number of your fan list. If your Facebook fans are over 20,000 and above then this Plugin can multiply your traffic via Facebook's social network of 800 Million users but the plugin proves close to useless when it comes to blogs with fan following less than 10,000. Why? Lets explain it further..
Can Google Index Facebook Comments?
Now this is an important topic. Facebook comments load inside an IFRAME which in other words is a separate mini window within your blog. Search spiders don't have the ability to access IFRAMES due to security measures set by application-serving sites like Facebook. Users need to submit a password and username in order to access the IFRAME and post their views but search robots and malicious software robots are blocked as soon as they see an IFRAME tag. Thus all your precious comments which is a rich content gets neglected and You can't expect to drive traffic out of your comments .Read further to know how badly can this damage traffic.
Are Facebook Comments a Content?
Every single detail that you display on your blog from Titles, headlines, sidebar titles, images, post content and comments are indexed and crawled by Google and are therefore called a content. You get traffic for publishing quality content. Comments play an important role in increasing your keyword density and in further strengthening the post with its topic theme. Valuable comments that are posted by loyal readers with related keywords are crawled regularly by search robots. Most often the traffic that we receive is often through comments published on this blog by readers. If you write a post of at least 500 words and succeed in receiving at least 5-10 valuable 40-50 words of length comments then you are actually entertaining search spiders with Quality Content of a minimum 700-1000 words! Half of the work is done by your readers and this is another interesting fact that explains why blog readers are a valuable asset.
Unfortunately since Facebook comments can not be accessed by spiders, crawled and indexed therefore they server no value as Content. Though there exists plugins for wordpress that store Facebook comments on your server and makes them available for search engines to crawl them thus making the Facebook plugin a SEO friendly one. But this feature is not possible with free hosted sites and blogs. Thus For blogger users, Facebook comment box is not a good asset if Fan count is less than 20k.
Shall you use it or not?
Use it if you think you can convert your Fan base to double its current size but do this only if your Facebook Fans are great in number approximately close to 20k. Else if your Fan following is low and you are busy in driving organic traffic through search engines and you highly depend on them, then the best would be to stick to your default comment system.
Blogger's recent introduction of [a href="http://www.mybloggertricks.com/2012/01/blogger-threaded-comments-for-custom.html" target="_blank"]threaded comments[/a] Feature has further improved the default commenting system. Therefore why would now someone jump to disqus or Facebook?
Can we use both Facebook and Blog Comment Systems?
Of course you can. We have already shared a tutorial on how to [a href="http://www.mybloggertricks.com/2011/06/add-facebook-comments-box-to-blogger.html" target="_blank"]add Facebook comments plugin along with blogger's comment box[/a]. But its not amongst our best recommendation because again you are losing half of your comments and in most cases people are so much addicted to Facebook that they would always give it first priority thus you end up with no purpose.
So What are you thinking?
It was our duty to share the technical drawbacks of Facebook Comment plugin and share the best possible tips to make use of it. Nothing improves traffic except your selection of topics. Writing on hot demanded topics is what blogging is all about. If you really focus more towards this part then you can certainly expect a better living online in future. Peace and blessings pals! :)
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