Facebook is Stealing Your Hard Earned Rankings
You’ve probably spent time, budget and endless stress on building high rankings for your keywords. A new player has come to town and is creeping up on your current position without even trying. Whether you sell shoes, music, tickets, heck, even Disney movies, your business is not safe.
Facebook is creeping into search results through events, groups, fan pages, and iLike pages. Events were touched on by Tamar.com earlier this week making us all think about the security side of indexable event pages. While that’s another can of worms, indexing groups, fan pages and iLike pages bring up big questions of where, why and how for your business.
Where are these rankings showing up? Searches for Victoria’s Secret, Nike Shoes, Vodka, and Coldplay bring back Facebook as the 28th, 30th, 51st, and 28th result respectively. While ankings 30th isn’t impressive, the fact remains that Facebook isn’t trying and they were also not ranking AT ALL a few days ago. It’s hard to know when Google started indexing because these weren’t on anyone’s radar at position #452, but being at #28 definitely raises a brow to how far these could move.
For Nike Shoes, Facebook is one position behind FootLocker.com. Facebook staggered one ahead of Vox for Vodka. They jumped one behind a small site called TicketMaster.com for Coldplay. Some big names are getting a small bump back.
Why are these rankings showing up? The groups and fan sites are ginormous. Victoria’s Secret, Nike Shoes, Vodka, and Coldplay each have hundreds of thousands of fans. The college kids like vodka with their Coldplay. Who knew?
These sites aren’t just full of disheveled forums, but contain videos, photos, events, message boards, product offers, downloads, even discographies. They are turning into the unofficial pages for products, services, bands, stores, and even Disney movies.
These results are relevant and definitely give some retailers, ticket websites, music sites and others a pinch in the arm. Can a business create and manipulate a group? Not likely. Spamming for fan groups is a no-no and you’ll need to build a base of at least 50,000 fans to gain any traction in the engines.
What can be done? All links on Facebook pages are already no-followed, so joining and spamming isn’t a good option for Google results. A few businesses have been able to capitalize like Rhapsody, iTunes and Amazon. They are taking advantage of iLike pages that are beginning to show up (System of a Down ranks 53) by having favorite songs downloadable through the band homepage.
So if you’re able to download songs, buy shoes, and purchase lingerie from links on these pages, what is stopping Facebook from becoming the largest affiliate marketer on the web?
Posted: 09.12.08
Clint Dixon:
So sorry but not all links are no followed from Facebook.
Might want to research your facts before publishing. You can be sued for inaccuracies in print. Just like any newspaper or magazine!
wil:
Clint, the fact that all links are NOT no followed has very little to do with the value of this post.
You know the theme of this post is not about the value of followed-no followed links. But about how Facebook could become an affiliate as a way to earn revenue.
While I (this is Wil speaking, not Adam the author) welcome comments on our blog, I really think that your tone and comment is kinda ass-holeish.
The right way to go about correcting someone is saying, hey buddy the links are followed in certain parts, like here, here, and here.
In that way you help us in he same way we put stuff on our blog to try to help everyone.
The post is NOT about the link value of facebook links, if it was then I would REALLY feel like we screwed up, and we do sometimes.
So we put something out there to try to get people thinking about how facebook pages getting indexed could impact our landscape and you take it as an opportunity to leave snide remarks with NO intent to correct us and help us and our little community.
It is how our industry is built, people helping one another.
This stuff comes back around – next time you have a bad day, and you just wonder why this is happening to you. Just keep in mind that your karma is in the crapper and you probably deserve it. Next time you want to make yourself feel better by smacking someone who is trying to help, please find somewhere else to do it.
I will not respond, this blogs intent is to help, and I think overall we do a decent job of that, we love it when people correct us, but how you do something matters, and this was just a low class way of doing it.
Adam:
In terms of groups and profile links, they are all nofollowed. It looks like some application links are followed, so while not the focus of the article, good clarification. Are you seeing followed links anywhere else?
Sari:
Is it possible to have a group that is not “no follow” or does it have to be a fan site to be followed and effect the search results ranking?
Chucklyn:
Hey SEERs – great piece!
But I think perhaps we’re all forgetting one important point:
We’re talking about bad mamma-jammas like Yahoo & Google here!
If Facebook’s results truly start dominating SERPs then I have full faith that the Search Gods will alter the Almighty Algorithms accordingly.
I’m not discounting Facebook’s potential as the NKOTB Affiliate Marketing Megalopolis should this trend continue. After all, Aff Mktg is not my bag.
But I do think it’s worth considering that the SERPs don’t let much of anything dominate the rankings.
Facebook as result #1? Perhaps. Facebook as the entire first page? I think not.
And thank goodness. I’ll purchase my wife’s unmentionables directly – not via ANY Facebook page, thank you very much!
Adam:
Good points to bring up Chucklyn. We’ve seen the search gods step in and change things before, I don’t think this is any different. Could future ranking depend on the type of facebook listing, whether it’s a fan site, group, event? I have seen much more relevant information on Fan sites. The Nike Shoes site that is ranking well does not have nearly the content and info compared to the Victoria’s Secret or Coldplay fan sites.
wil:
Chucklyn, good points. I wonder if it would be like wikipedia, where they kinda dominate the serps as well – since Google nor Yahoo has a social network with any real reach I think they’ll let this slide for a while.