Facebook SEO aims to Rank On Brand names and Profiles

One of my friends knows about my infatuation with Facebook exploration and thus asked me a question about Facebook privacy that made me think of something.

Since a while back you have to uncheck a button in order to not show up in Google with your profile. This is quite straight forward. One thing which is not that straight forward is what becomes visible and why exactly that information is visible.

This is my search result visible in Google.

SEO & Internal links to make Pages rank

Now, I know there are some of you who do not believe in PR-sculpting. I do, and I think that the person working with SEO at Facebook does as well. Cause it is quite evident from what is visible in these profile displays visible from the Google searches what strategy Facebook has.

They want users to rank on their names and they want pages to rank for brands. They are turning all the link love we all provide to by linking to our profile pages through widgets and direct links, into power through anchor text internal links. Since the platform is so strong there is no question about it that this has an enormous effect on placement in the search results.

Facebook on site SEO sucks

Facebook does not otherwise have any on site SEO to talk about. They have massive amounts of content and massive amounts of links, but their front end rendering scripted nasty stuff is just horrible.

Yes, they are using your name/pagename as the H1 (only when logged in though) and they do actually have all the components in there. But the structure which is not a part of the internal links is just HORRIBLE.

That’s it for this post. I won’t talk down on them in more detail, but as my friend asked me I couldn’t get this out of my system other than to blog about it.

//Jesper

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4 thoughts on “Facebook SEO aims to Rank On Brand names and Profiles”

  1. They also mad it possible for people and brands to choose their vanity URL´s a while back ago, which would make it easier for them to rank on brands and names.

    The guy who runs the marketing team on Facebook is a very smart SEO and really knows what he is doing. So this is definetely a strategic move from their side.

    Reply
  2. No doubt about it. They even gave the privilege for some major brands to buy their vanity urls even before they went out with the big launch to the “common corps”.

    I bet a million … something I don’t have…. on that the redesign they have been boasting about for so long will turn out to be a neatly rendered front end code that will kick ass and rank first page on most brand names eventually.

    The complex situation for the companies then become that the more fans they have, the stronger their page becomes and the more internal links will point towards their Page. This in turn will lead to companies spending money to increase facebook’s visibility in some sense 🙂

    Ingenious in other words.

    Reply
  3. Facebook has always been a strong performer in the Google results for my name. For as long as I’ve been paying attention, it’s played second fiddle to LinkedIn. Lately, however, it has also dropped below my Anobii (a book site) and Athlinks (race results) profile pages.

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  4. Interesting. Have you added links recently to your Anobii page? LinkedIn has had search engine friendly pages for quite some time and that is probably why they are linking so well. They also use follow links from their profiles and index their directory results which seems to have some effect.

    Let’s follow this development with interest 🙂

    Reply

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