Facebook Grants Google Access to Groups and Events
Posted by Nick O'Neill on September 7th, 2008 9:13 PMLast night Facebook started making Facebook groups, wall posts and discussion topics available to search engines. This means Facebook is now attempting to gain more traffic through at least one more significant source on the site. It also appears that events are also accessible via search engines. This means that in short time we should start seeing significantly more items from within Facebook showing up in Google.
In contrast to many other social networks, Facebook realizes that making a large portion of the site available to search engines drives it significantly more traffic. It will be interesting to see how this effects Facebook’s overall site traffic over the coming month. Not all groups and events are available though. Only public events and groups are accessible to Google.
It is now increasingly important to focus on the content within groups and events as it will be accessible to the public events. Thanks to Mike Ashworth for the heads up.
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7 Responses to “Facebook Grants Google Access to Groups and Events”
It will be interesting to trend Google results for “Lost My Phone” over time.
I'm surprised it's taken them so long! Certainly gives groups a higher profile 'beyond the facebook community', which I suspect will drive more Facebook registrations.
Thinking about the various protest groups that have been setup on facebook (the anti-HSBC campaign in the UK comes to mind) it will be interesting if groups protesting corporations will become more powerful when the 'outside facebook world' can readily read the grievances etc. of group members… I'd say yes, the empowerment is about to be increased, but by how much?
Hi Nick, thanks for posting that info I passed over.
In my own particular instance this was of interest (discovered) as an individual was posting libellous comments on a facebook group about a client of mine.
We were managing this on the basis that as it's in Facebook as opposed to whole of the internet we'd take a softer line to start with.
This view may now have to change as a result of these comments now being indexed by Google.
It's going to be interesting to see how various Companies etc. respond to comments, especially as some of the things posted in Facebook can be very negative.
Mike Ashworth
Marketing Coach and Consultant
Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, UK
I am curious as to where you found this information.
Does someone if members of groups and events are now gonna appear in search results?
That makes a MAJOR difference in my eyes. I'm not sure you want everybody on the earth to know what parties you attended or which groups you belong to through a simple google search
It will be good to see how many groups are listed.
My group is simply looking for couples looking to make new friends, hope google find it !!
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=274117391...
swardizayee
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