Google Now Indexing Facebook Comments on Third Party Sites
On Monday, it was realized that Googlebots, Google’s web-page scanning technology, now recognizes comments on javascript platforms such as Facebook. Before, third-party web-sites would have a “Sign in with Facebook” option, allowing people to comment without creating a new account, accompanied by their profile picture, user name, and link to their page. This convenience encouraged user-interaction. Now, if a Facebook account holder signs into another third-party site using his or her Facebook account and leaves a comment, that comment can now show up in Google searches. This also applies to public Facebook pages (such as brands and celebrities) but comments left on friends’ pages are not yet being indexed.
Is Google indexing to provide better search results, or to gain more control over social media and its network power? The answer seems to be the latter, since the comments are going to be used for page rank, web sites have a greater incentive to install the “Connect with Facebook” add-on, which was previously for mere convenience and encouraging feedback from readers. The Googlebot will allow Google to be able to use Facebook and its information to gain power for themselves by combining their information search engine with the social network.
A page is considered important if it is cited by other important pages, and is the mode of endorsement that forms the basis for the pagerank measure of importance. However, with this new change in indexing comments, web-sites may use comments to boost their page rank, which would oppose the hub/authority pagerank rule. Whereas the hub/authority rule was structured around the number of links in and links out (and the page’s importance which links them), including comments into the page-ranking may alter the usefulness or relevance of a webpage.
News article from Cnet: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57318871-93/say-what-google-now-indexing-facebook-comments/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20