Facebook Gives Application Developers a Taste of SEO

Posted by Nick O'Neill on October 20th, 2007 11:54 AM

One of the biggest downfalls of Facebook applications has always been inaccessibility to search engines. Instead, Facebook application developers have been forced to invest substantial amounts into advertising if they hope to get any traction. A few lucky applications have been able to experience viral growth, since the platform opened up 5 months ago, growing virally has become significantly challenging.

Today, Facebook has announced that they are enabling search engines to index the application directory and application about pages. On the application about pages, individuals not logged into Facebook will be able to view the application information, discussion boards and the wall. While this new feature does not enable full search engine optimization, it definitely helps.

Facebook is eventually going to be forced to enable applications full search engine optimization. This is becuase SEO will be the primary differentiating factor between the upcoming Google platform and the Facebook platform. I always tell people that if I had launched this blog as an application, there is no way it would be as popular. As long as that’s the case, the Facebook platform will remain to be one of a handful of distribution channels that application developers choose to leverage.

This is a great first step by Facebook. I only hope that they give search engines complete access to applications in the near future.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 20th, 2007 at 11:54 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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engtech 11 months ago 1 point
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this is really huge if you have a non-facebook audience / promotion already.

it also makes it easier for people to write about apps and link to them on blogs.

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peter corbett 11 months ago 1 point
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Nick, full access to facebook applications by google and others would mean significant portions of our social graphs would be visible to the world.

Facebook is what it is because the graph is not public, only available to friends, facebook, app devs and othe marketing partners. If the graph gets to exposed ppl will dump facebook.

So...I guess my point is I believe in the balance there promoting with the move.

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