Basically, the FB Comments box will replace the normal WordPress comments. This leads to an issue where Google might not see your comments, given that they’re in an iframe and on Facebook.
So, the plugin imports the comments from Facebook onto the page in a way that will allow Google the ability to index them properly, by loading and showing the comments to people who don’t have javascript enabled.
Thanks for the explanation, Otto.
I don’t think there’s any evidence that implementing Facebook comments in this way will improve SEO. I’ve read that Google has already gotten better at crawling and indexing JavaScript comment systems like Disqus, LiveFyre and Facebook comments.
Personally, I’ll just continue to use the normal Facebook comment implementation on my sites.
All it really does is to ensure that the content is there and visible to search engines, even if they aren’t smart enough to read into FB comments. It’s not a trick or “bad” or anything like that, since it does serve the purpose of showing the comments to non-javascript browsers as well.
It doesn’t “improve SEO”, because that phrase is meaningless, really. SEO is not a thing that can be “improved”. All you can do is to ensure that the data is there and indexable and human readable in the right way.
