It seems, according to the Interwebs, that Google has decided to focus on copying everything that Facebook does. The most recent announcement seems to be that they are in the middle of planning a commenting platform to compete with Facebook comments.
There’s some obvious good things about this, mainly that this could easily be integrated into the Google+ but also be part of results. One of the huge problems with Facebook comments is that they are not index-able by search engines, including Google. This means when someone writes a Facebook comment, it wont show up in results or help with keywords or links.
What does this mean about third party systems? The NextWeb asked:
The question remains how this will affect services that are dedicated exclusively to providing a comment platform, like Disqus and Livefyre, who may struggle to compete against the likes of Facebook and Google down the line, each of wish enjoy a well-established user-base.
SlashGear had some thoughts about what would make Google comments better:
Each individual comment, meanwhile, could have its own unique URL – something suggested by CNET – which would allow for more precise linking as well as each comment to be its own, separately indexed search result. Given the popularity of Google search, and Facebook and Twitter’s reluctance to allow the company to include their content in results, it looks like Google is planning to simply bypass them altogether.
As a note, we don’t use Facebook’s commenting platform at PMi for the above reason. Without having them indexed, it seems that we are missing out on valuable SEO.
