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Facebook Steps Up SEO for Brand Pages with Millions of New Indexable Links
November 17th, 2008
| By Justin Smith | 42 Comments » |
In a move that will increase the amount of Page Rank and traffic Google gives to Facebook Pages, Facebook launched a new feature over the weekend that essentially added hundreds of millions of new internal links to Facebook’s brand Pages in users’ public search listings.
Public search listings are Facebook’s way of exposing user information to Google. Before today, the default public search listings included users’ name, profile picture, network, and a few friends’ photos. Now, Facebook has added Pages that users are a fan of to users’ default public search listings.
This means that if a user is a fan of The Gap, U2, or Barack Obama, that information is now listed in that user’s public search listing. In addition, each of those items listed point back to Facebook Pages – such as The Gap’s Facebook Page, U2’s Facebook Page, and Barack Obama’s Facebook Page.
The net result? 112,000 links to The Gap’s Facebook Page just appeared this weekend. 188,000 links to U2’s Facebook Page just appeared, and 3,100,000 links to Obama’s Facebook Page just appeared.
Considering that Facebook turned on links to Pages from about 120 million profile page public search listings, the number of new internal links to Pages on the facebook.com domain this weekend likely increased by several hundred million.
The SEO experts in the crowd will be able to gauge how impactful this change will be in light of the thousands of complex factors Google looks at when deciding who to give SERP real estate to.
Facebook describes the update to users as a way to make it easier for friends to find you in search results, and that is surely the case:
But ultimately for marketers, this step by Facebook increases the weight Google will give to brand Pages. Brand and marketing managers should not be surprised to see their Facebook Pages rising in Google search results in the months ahead.
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November 17th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
Hey Justin,
One part of this isn’t accurate. Gap didn’t get 112,000 new links because only 5 fan pages are shown with each profile. The same thing that happened to you happened to me and most of the fan pages that are publicly displayed for me are for the Facebook pages I’m a fan of.
It’s random chance whether or not a page receives a link.
Best,
Nick
November 17th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
You’re right, it won’t be exactly 112K, but it should be fairly close. You’d need to know the mean and median distribution of the number of Pages users are fans of in order to precisely calculate the total number of links added for all Pages and for any Page in particular.
J
November 17th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
[...] change could send hundreds of millions of links from Facebook profiles to Pages, as Justin Smith estimated after he spotted the changes this [...]
November 17th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
All those links comes from the same domain, so Google is not going to give them much Pagerank.
November 17th, 2008 at 11:01 pm
Keen observation, Justin. As I understand it (from my limited use of Google’s Web Master tools), Google gets information about the hosting site from internal links. Seems like this will help the page rank high for “Gap Facebook” but not have much effect on the page ranking high for “Gap”.
November 17th, 2008 at 11:11 pm
@Mauro
you probably have never tasted the power of internal linking juice of a high authortive site…?
November 18th, 2008 at 12:29 am
Mauro is partly right – as all links are from same domain so google won’t give them much love. But look at it from another angle – with their fav Facebook Pages now in everyone’s public profile, the number of clicks (and subsequent conversion)to those Pages would have a snowball effect. This would lead to higher traffic to their sites – working well in Page owners’ favour big time!
November 18th, 2008 at 2:46 am
[...] http://www.insidefacebook.com/2008/11/17/facebook-internally-seoing-brand-pages-wants-more-traffic-a... [...]
November 18th, 2008 at 5:21 am
[...] was going to blog about this a long time ago, but I found a recent post on the Inside Facebook blog that pushed me to do this one. What a lot of people don’t know is that when you search for [...]
November 18th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
And with that… anyone know how to move an FB Group to become a Fan Page? I created the Savvy Auntie FB Group before Fan Pages existed. Is it even worth moving over? Thanks – Melanie
November 18th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
I actually think this may lead to the whole friend train issue that myspace had until they made their links non-SEO friendly
November 19th, 2008 at 8:51 am
[...] [via] [...]
November 19th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Is this in effect for all public profiles? I tried searching a few of my friends who I know are fans of various things and didn’t see any more than their basic info and “some people they are friends with.”
November 19th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
It looks like Facebook still hasn’t fully launched this yet…
November 20th, 2008 at 4:15 am
I agree with just in. Facebook hasn’t launched it fully.
November 20th, 2008 at 4:19 am
I am sure some blackhat will be coming up with some ideas to manipulate the whole thing.
November 20th, 2008 at 11:11 am
Page Rank is not domain specific. Internal links pass as much PR as external links. Other things like anchor text and trust may be weighted differently but Page Rank is not dampened between domains.
November 20th, 2008 at 6:55 pm
A site this powerful directing all that link juice to the pages will have a great effect….they really won’t need much help ranking anyway with the power of the facebook domain alone.
Facebook has somewhere around 10 million inbound links….jeepers!
November 20th, 2008 at 8:28 pm
Awesome post, Justin. Really good news for marketers/SEO peeps. I just wish Facebook would make it *much* easier to locate where and how to set up FB Pages.
Pages are an awesome feature of FB, but most peeps don’t know you have to scroll down to the very foot & click on Advertising. I wrote a post with tutorial vid here: http://whyfacebook.com/2008/09/25/how-to-create-and-promote-your-facebook-fan-page/
Cheers!
@marismith
November 20th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
RE: “The net result? 112,000 links to The Gap’s Facebook Page just appeared this weekend. 188,000 links to U2’s Facebook Page just appeared, and 3,100,000 links to Obama’s Facebook Page just appeared.”
Just how stupid do YOU think Google is??? While Google shows inbound links from external sites you can bet London to a brick ‘noise’ links (like these) are simply discounted.
November 20th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
One problem: many SEOs are in agreement that the G algo prefers pages that build up links slowly over time (aka more naturally) than one isolated big hit (which is a great indication of spammy link-building tactics)
November 20th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
Yep, fully agree, SeekGeek. Google goes to great lengths and expense to ensure Stanford’s prized PageRank is NOT easy to manipulate.
ALL this ill thought through scheme will do is raise a BIG red flags on sites that TRY to take advantage of this *perceived* loophole.
Gaining massive amounts of inbound links is fine IF you can maintain the trend, if not you ARE your OWN worse enemy for trying to fool Google.
It’s SITE like this one who post opinions as fact that give the ENTIRE SEO industry a black-eye.
DREAM ON Justin Smith
November 21st, 2008 at 1:24 pm
I agree to this point but not all the softwares produce the same amount of backlinks or the sites. iwebtool, alexa, urltrend. give differrent version of backlinks for the same website. Big confusion, who to believe.
November 23rd, 2008 at 1:50 am
There are backlinks that pass on PageRank AND traffic and then there are backlinks that pass on traffic ONLY. Links from Blog post, Forum posts, Newsgroups, Social Media sites, GuestBooks etc all fall under “backlinks that pass on traffic ONLY”. Social Media sites pass on ‘junk traffic’ ONLY.
November 24th, 2008 at 8:13 am
[...] recently Facebook added fan links to public pages, creating a tremendous density of internal links to brand and product pages. The likely goal of [...]
November 27th, 2008 at 9:34 am
[...] Facebook steps up SEO for brand pages (Inside Facebook) [...]
November 29th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
[...] Inside Facebook talks about improved SEO with Brand Pages. [...]
December 2nd, 2008 at 11:56 am
[...] Inside Facebook detailed updates to Facebook’s public search listings for users designed to increase Facebook Pages SEO juice by adding millions of internal links. At the time, Facebook’s design for public search [...]
December 9th, 2008 at 10:34 am
Wow, millions of links point to a page in one day, does SEs ban it?
December 10th, 2008 at 3:51 am
Unfortunately Facebook only gives out nofollow link tags.
December 29th, 2008 at 8:29 pm
I didn’t know Facebook pages are sooooo easy to create! Thanks for the heads up. I really love these Facebook pages.
January 5th, 2009 at 1:10 am
Thanks for the article, I started 2 fan pages which both jumped to more than 25 000 fans each in its first weeks, of which the brands appear # 1 on the google search rankings now.
April 23rd, 2009 at 1:29 pm
[...] URL” (like http://www.facebook.com/barackobama) in order to make them easier to find and improve their SEO. In addition, some have reported seeing survey questions from Facebook asking users if they would [...]
June 8th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
[...] contrast, Facebook is largely private. With some notable exceptions (like profile photo and fan pages you’re a fan of), almost all personal profile data, photos, [...]
June 9th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
[...] the Username Landrush of 2009 for Facebook profiles and Pages – and with it perhaps the greatest Facebook SEO opportunity to [...]
July 15th, 2009 at 9:14 am
[...] You can now optimize a page in Facebook for higher rankings. Actually you have been able to do this for awhile (almost a year). [...]
August 28th, 2009 at 2:01 am
I am still not clear about the nofollow attribute: Facebook has that for all the outbound links, so what the value for SEO?
Thanks!
September 20th, 2009 at 11:22 pm
[...] positions in the search engines as it is a massive site and has a lot of trust with Google so when they started making fan pages a priority it was time to get serious about your own page. You will find some great resources here [...]
September 21st, 2009 at 10:05 am
[...] with Facebook: it’s a proprietary network. Yes, the Gods of Facebook have made it easier to find your branded page via Google. Yes, they’ve made it easier to find your content from within the network. But [...]
October 11th, 2009 at 4:48 am
iam agree this one
October 15th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
I am agree, too
October 31st, 2009 at 5:30 pm
[...] Facebook places links to Facebook Pages on the default version of Facebook users’ profile pages which are visible to search engines, the more fans you get, the more links you’ll have to your Page within Facebook. For Pages with [...]