For all of those who are unfamiliar with Facebook Connect, this is something which enables your blog, mobile device, or software to integrate with Facebook and give you Facebook functionality. There are plugins which you can use to utilize Facebook Connect easily with your site. One of the most comment implementations of this I see webmasters using is turning their comments section into a Facebook comments section. You’ve undoubtedly seen this used by a number of webmasters yourself use Facebook comments in WordPress.

Facebook Comments in WordPress

There are a few reasons for why you would want to use Facebook comments in WordPress. For one thing it encourages more commenting on your site with Facebook (so take it with a grain of salt) estimating 40-50% more commenting on sites which use their system.

People are typically signed into Facebook anyways so that it’s easy for them to simply type in their comment. Their profile picture is put then right next to their post with a link back to their profile, so it’s more much social obviously.

The comments box is also entirely customizable so you can vary the text and background colors while inputting your own CSS if you like to shape the look of it.

At the same time, Facebook comments holds one significant drawback which is it is not SEO friendly. Search engines like Google take comments into account and indexes them when ranking a site and keywords used in the comments section actually can help you rank if they are related to the focus of that page.

Unfortunately, Facebook comments are not recognized or indexed by Google, so basically it doesn’t help you from an SEO standpoint.

Whether you want to use Facebook comments in WordPress is your decision so you have to weight the pros and the cons out together. I recommend that you consider this post on how to get blog comments on your site while you mill it over.