I’m not sure when this happened but it appears Google now indexes over 52 million Facebook groups. Facebook has told us that all “open” groups (via privacy settings) have always been indexable, however the amount of information available to Google has always been in flux. At one point discussion threads within Facebook groups were made accessible to Google, however it wasn’t clear what other information was available. It now appears that all public groups are indexed, and have been for a while.

So why would Facebook open up access to over 52 million groups for Google? The primary reason is that Google is one of the biggest drivers of traffic for Facebook, if not the largest. With an additional 52 million pages indexed, that provides a substantial amount of traffic to the site. How much more traffic? We can’t really say, however Google claims that they have over 745 million pages indexed on Facebook, which means groups accounts for a large portion of search traffic. Compare the following sites and the approximate number of pages they have indexed by Google:

• Facebook - 745 Million
• Yahoo - 631 Million
• YouTube - 549 million
• Amazon.com - 150 Million
• Twitter - 115 Million
• Wikipedia - 52 Million
• Wordpress.com - 103 Million
• eBay - 81 Million

Based on Google’s own statistics, there is no site larger than Facebook in terms of the number of indexed pages. That’s a pretty impressive stat on its own. It also makes it clear why Google would have a small obsession with the company. Also, as the community platform of choice for most internet users, Facebook has a rapidly growing percentage of the entire internet on their own servers. Facebook continues to drive traffic to their site through effective search engine optimization combined with user generated content.