Facebook and its influence on SEO
This past week I’ve been researching and testing Facebook pages and their influence on SEO. Personally I never saw the value of having a Facebook page for WebGrowth as my focus is SEO and not social media.
Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, has been quoted that Google will be taking into account company branding in their algorithm.
The internet is fast becoming a “cesspool” where false information thrives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday. Speaking with an audience of magazine executives visiting the Google campus here as part of their annual industry conference, he said their brands were increasingly important signals that content can be trusted.
“Brands are the solution, not the problem,” Mr. Schmidt said. “Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”
“Brand affinity is clearly hard wired,” he said. “It is so fundamental to human existence that it’s not going away. It must have a genetic component.”
So surely a company with a high fan base within Facebook can be regarded as a company with a good brand and following? It is an interesting theory which I will be testing over the next several months.
For the record, I searched for “webgrowth facebook” within Google.com yesterday (13 May 2009). WebGrowth’s Facebook page was ranked at #12 (I checked Google’s cache and the page only had 4 fans), today I did a search and it is ranked #9 (the page fan base has increased to 9).
Updated: 27 June 2009
WebGrowth’s Facebook page is ranked #5 with 11 Fans.
The link back to WebGrowth from the Facebook page is a nofollow so in theory no link juice should be passed onto WebGrowth’s main website. This does not mean Google does not follow the link though, the guys at SEOmoz also have their own theory on this.
This is my opinion but I reckon Google is evolving their algorithm into measuring brands and ranking accordingly, so their algorithm is so complex that it can evaluate if a nofollow link is worth following. So a page from Facebook with a high fan base will get the nod from Google and follow the link back to the company’s website.