2012-01-17

Google crawls Facebook Comments? Not sure...

On Jan.9 2012, Brendan Irvine-Broque posted an announcement on InsideFacebook saying that Google may have started indexing Facebook comments: http://www.insidefacebook.com/2012/01/09/how-facebook-comments-impact-google-search-rankings/

Together with Brendan and other subscribers of InsideFacebook, we made a series of experiments to check how it works. As of Jan.17, the results are negative. Nothing from our tests appeared in Google as a result of crawling the comments. The whole discussion, however, has been "leaked" through another website, which grabbed our comments from FB and pasted them as a plain HTML.

Brendan pointed out that:

  • InsideFacebook uses an older version of FB plugin
  • It may take time to Google to crawl all comments
  • There are comments from other sites that have been indexed by Google
So, this is not the end of story. Stay tuned.

2012-01-03

Squidoo and SEO? (Update Jan.3, 2012)

Happy New Year to everybody!


This will end my experiment with Squidoo. The results were NEGATIVE.


Please note that what I've done did NOT prove anything, except one thing: Squidoo is not a "magic wand" for SEO purposes.


Here is the summary of my observations:

  • Posting something to Squidoo does not bring it to Google, unless you place a link to it from somewhere. In other words, Google does not crawl the entire Squidoo in search for new pages ("lenses" as they call it).
  • It takes too long for Google to reindex the page. A month after I changed my experimental lens' content, it still was not in Google; a special link I placed there was ignored by Google either (obviously because Google did not index that page again).
  • Squidoo is a primitive, buggy and ugly tool built to spam search engines with junk content. It's definitely not a "Site For People", but a "Site For Search Engines". For some reason, "Mr. Panda" did not bring "Mr. Squidoo" down, so it can still work, but I decided that my time will be better spent somewhere else.
I deleted my experimental lens.

Thank you for your attention!