Will Facebook Give Away Vanity URLs in a Landrush?
While some businesses working with Facebook have been able to get a Facebook vanity URL for some time now, rumors are surfacing that Facebook may soon open up vanity URL registration to any user who wants one in a first come, first served land rush.
Under such a system, users would be able to get URLs like facebook.com/mark for their own personal profiles. (However, some of the most common first names are already taken.)
Administering such a landrush would be a significant challenge. Presumably, Facebook wouldn’t let users register trademarked terms or generic words like “lasvegashotels” that could be used to simply generate spammy SEO traffic. Facebook would have to establish clear rules for how the vanity URLs would be distributed.
Clearly, vanity URLs represent one of the best SEO opportunities on Facebook ever – and more vanity URLs would be good for Facebook’s own SEO efforts, too. However, Facebook has to be careful how they roll out the program, because URL changes are hard to undo in the SEO world. Facebook pages with vanity URLs are especially valuable to businesses, many of whom would likely be willing to pay significant chunks of money for the rights to a good vanity URL. Such a program could be a nice secondary revenue stream for Facebook.
As of yet, Facebook has not officially stated how it decides who gets vanity URLs, or what its future roadmap for vanity URLs will be. A Facebook spokesperson recently told Inside Facebook:
“We don’t offer specifics on which parties may have received ‘vanity’ URLs, but it’s something we’ve experimented with and have only offered on a very limited basis. We’re looking at how we might roll this functionality out to all of our users, but we don’t have anything to announce at this time.”
In other words, Facebook is still evaluating different ways of rolling out vanity URLs to balance SEO and direct sales opportunities. Personally, I’d open up the bidding to businesses first before giving away vanity URLs to users.
June 1st, 2009 at 1:56 am
They should have done so a long time ago… twitter accounts are already getting nice SEO traffic thanks to the pretty URL’s.
June 1st, 2009 at 5:59 am
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June 1st, 2009 at 1:41 pm
This isn’t new…Kevin Rose and Gary Vaynerchuk have had their vanity URLs for some time now.
Basically you either have to work at FB to get your single name URL or be a friend of someone. I think Kevin’s tweet about the URL, named the person at FB who hooked him up.
facebook.com/kevinrose
facebook.com/gary
June 1st, 2009 at 2:28 pm
…if the domain name experience is anything to go by, even having a sunrise process ends up being a rush. Given the relatively low entrance criteria for sunrise phases (you normally just need a national trademark, doesn’t matter what classes), it narrows it down, but it’s still a random selection of applicants. It will be even harder for Facebook to make a sensible system, whos users are not used to protecting a brand.
June 3rd, 2009 at 6:25 am
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June 8th, 2009 at 11:29 am
H’mmmm…..vanity urls just seem like a mean name for those pages.
June 9th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
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June 12th, 2009 at 5:10 am
[...] Will Facebook Give Away Vanity URLs in a Landrush? (insidefacebook.com) [...]
June 14th, 2009 at 7:00 am
Good idea!
June 15th, 2009 at 3:11 am
[...] Will Facebook Give Away Vanity URLs in a Landrush? (insidefacebook.com) [...]
June 15th, 2009 at 3:20 am
[...] Will Facebook Give Away Vanity URLs in a Landrush? (insidefacebook.com) [...]
June 15th, 2009 at 4:56 am
[...] Will Facebook Give Away Vanity URLs in a Landrush? (insidefacebook.com) [...]
June 15th, 2009 at 4:58 am
[...] Will Facebook Give Away Vanity URLs in a Landrush? (insidefacebook.com) [...]
July 1st, 2010 at 9:42 pm
Facebook policy of not registering generic terms as Vanity URLs is understandable. But what if a small business owner wants to register vanity url under his business name to attract this customer as an advertising campaign, why can’t he do that? what if he provides a proof of his business registration? and has a domain name registered with same name. can he get Facebook Vanity url same as that of his business name.
August 28th, 2010 at 11:01 pm
I think Facebook’s policy is understandable.