Facebook plays the Google ranking game

By Simon on 6 Sep 07

Categories: marketing, website, SEO

Simon's facebook page

Facebook has announced that their members will soon start appearing in the search results of search engines like Google. So, in a couple of weeks time if you should choose to look for me online and enter ‘Simon Cookson' into Google you may well be shown my facebook page in the search results, Well, that sounds like quite a small thing, until you start to think it through...

The global blogging community, as well as some of the 39 million registered facebook members are getting a little twitchy about their privacy and the dissemination of personal information into the wider public domain. But, personally speaking that has never bothered me too much. I've always held the view that if you're putting something online then you've instantly lost control of who sees it and how it is used.

The thing that interests me more about this development is the impact this will have on how spammers and the commercial world regard facebook. One of the worst things about the Internet is how small scale, utterly un-commercial activities can soon get hijacked by spam and advertising. A good example of this appears to be Myspace. I've never been a fan of the social-networking site, and it now really seems to be suffering from an awful lot of spam and advertising.

So, will the advertising world take a fresh look at facebook now that results will be appearing on search engines? The marketing industry could use the social networking website in a number of ways. Facebook is all about making contact and connections and these are major buzzwords in marketing, product managers are obsessed with connecting their products with their target customers.

We might start to see products getting their own page; you never know you might get poked by the new ‘Chicken Tonight' facebook page. How would you feel getting a friend request from Vodaphone?

This might sound innocent enough, but one of the major downsides of the Internet is almost instant scalability. Might we reach a situation where your own page gets clogged up with hundreds of requests and ‘wall posts' from advertisers.

Lets see what the future holds, but in the meantime give me a poke or send me a friend request!

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