Don’t get too scared yet as Facebook probably will not allow this for long, but all the Facebook comments from your wall and from websites using the Facebook comment widget can cause your comments to appear in the Google index.
“This is not something that Facebook have actively introduced, but rather is a change brought about by Google and the way in which they index comments. Now when you comment both within Facebook and on a third party site, that comment is now crawlable by Google, leading to it being indexed on the search engine.”
This change to how comments are used and appear in Facebook has been done this past year to allow a more viral exchange or information within Facebook and Google has recently grabbed the content. To read more information, I suggest you read these two articles: Two important changes coming to Facebook Comments and Facebook adds ‘subscribe’ feature to comments. Both give more information about this important change and one that may be able to be leveraged for now for search placement.
Of important note is also the change on Facebook, clearly driven by Google+ to allow others to subscribe to your news feed if you have allowed this setting even if they are not your friends. This is particularly concerning for parents and those that really do not want to share their status updates with the world.
“Facebook is also letting people subscribe to news feeds of users they’re not friends with. Upon doing so, they will see the public updates the person has shared on their profile. And like with friends, users will be able to determine how many of those updates they will see in their news feed.” Read the full article.
With some of these important changes that Facebook has made in the recent months, it is now more important than ever to review your own account privacy settings and that of your children to assure that you are clear on what is being shared with the public and what is not to be shared. On my own personal profile, which I had locked down to friends only, the default button is Public meaning that by not changing the button for each status update or at the minimum making sure it is set to Friends, I unknowingly had been publishing my personal status updates publicly. Make sure you check as well. There are some things I just really don’t want to share with Google or the wider world on Facebook.