Embarrassing? Your Web Comments Could End Up in a Google Search

Many websites engage their followers by allowing comments, which can be run through third parties like Facebook Comments, Disqus and Intense Debate, according to Digital Inspiration. These comments previously may have been relatively unnoticed except for maybe by the commenting community and the comment moderator. Not anymore. Now they're being picked up in Google searches.

As Digital Inspiration points out, this means that these sites could get a sort of "SEO boost" from their comments. SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is usually a set of terms that helps improve the visibility of a website in a search.

But as I'm sure you can image, and as Gawker points out, this also opens the door for embarrassing and even mean comments on the Internet to arise in someone's Google search.

The comment Digital Inspiration uses, although not embarrassing, does illustrate how this could happen. See below for the commenter's opinion voiced via Facebook Comments on TechCrunch and then how it was found in a Google search.

Why is this happening? According to Digital Inspiration, these comments are usually not picked up by search engines because they're in JavaScript within an iframe code, but "Googlebots" now seem to be scanning this content too.

If you haven't made any uncouth comments using comment boxes like this, you should have nothing to worry about. But if you have...