Facebook profiles to go public….again?

Recent announcement by Facebook to expose a cut-down public profile for search engines to index, has managed to stir up the search, brand and privacy advocates.

The Facebook blog stated that in a couple of weeks they will allow search engines to crawl public profiles. But, an interesting article on Search engine land claims that this is nothing new. Search engines have always been able to index a profile, providing they could find it – a point proven by Tom Critchlow at Distilled, who linked to his public profile and managed to find it by searching in Google.

So the main difference is likely to be the integration of a people directory within Facebook, which would allow search engines to index the profiles without needing to find them through external links. But, those profiles that are likely to get more links will have a greater reputation and will outrank others with the same name.

Things could get interesting if online authors used Facebook as a people reference, in the same way people refer to Wikipedia.

From an SEO perspective, there’s unlikely to be any real link benefit from a profile – though it’s difficult to gage until we can see the implementation. Any external links allowed on a profile page is likely to have the rel-nofollow tag added to prevent link spam.

For reputation managers, a Facebook profile will provide yet another way to occupy more space on the home page for a search on a name or brand.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 2:32 pm and is filed under Social Media & Networks, Search engine marketing industry. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.