You probably already have a strong SEO strategy for your company’s website, and of course that’s important. Providing regular doses of fresh and relevant content on your blog, for example, is a great way to keep search engines interested in your site, which will in turn drive traffic to your business.
You probably also have a social media strategy in place, doing your best to engage your target market in a meaningful way across one or more social networks. You may have a Facebook page for your business, a Twitter account, or a YouTube channel, for example.
With Google’s recent announcement that it will now start indexing comments on Facebook, the intersection where SEO crosses social media has just become a lot bigger and more complicated. In the past, Google had trouble indexing comments from third-party JavaScript services like Disqus and Facebook comments, but now that the technology barrier has been breached, comments from those services are beginning to show up as indexed content on Google.
So what does this mean for the future of your SEO strategy? It’s hard to tell at this early stage, but certainly you need to be aware that there will be some changes. Many SEO experts are saying that indexing Facebook comments can only be good for rankings, but others have pointed out some potential problems.
For example, Google’s policy of penalizing for duplicate content may be an issue for those who have Facebook commenting activated on their blogs. When you post a comment on a blog via Facebook comments, it shows up not only on the blog in question, but also on your own Facebook profile, thus opening it to the possibility of being indexed as duplicate content. Multiply that by however many comments your blog is getting, and you see where this may be a problem.
However, there’s also the issue that posts with a lot of comments and user interaction do tend to rank higher than posts with no comments. With Facebook and Disqus comments now being indexed, this could spell a huge boost for some blog owners.
There’s no way to predict yet exactly how this new Google indexing ability will affect your particular SEO strategy in the long run. No doubt some businesses will be affected more than others in one direction or another. The key right now is just to be aware of the changes happening on search engines, and keep an eye on your analytic tools to see if any clear differences are emerging.