Want to jump to the top of Facebook’s search results for any term? I’ve figured out how to accomplish this in under 60 seconds since currently there are few people competing for placement within Facebook’s search results. While not all the techniques explained are recommended, hopefully this will give you a better idea as to how Facebook Search works. Let’s get started! A few minutes ago, I used one of the tools created by Cameron, one of our engineering gurus, to generate 9 Open Graph objects.
Then I instantly headed over to Facebook to do some searches on these objects. For example, SMX Advanced, where I spoke last week:
Notice since there isn’t a page on SMX Advanced, I am automatically #1 on this search, as Facebook’s search doesn’t do deep semantics yet– to associate similar terms. And then on Localeze, which is a local listings service, where this new object ranks #2:
The actual page has only 117 fans, but with very little effort, it would be possible to outrank the real page with a fake page that has more fans, using Facebook advertising techniques. In fact, here is a rogue page on Verizon that we created a few days ago with zero promotion:
As you can see, it ranks #1 on the term “verizon” in my Facebook search results. I pinged the folks on this page to ask them how they got there. The overwhelming answer? They found it via Facebook search. There are 245 fans there, which is quickly growing. It happens to be a complaint page, given that Verizon overcharged us recently and then failed on the follow-up, but that’s another story. The point is that exact matching on keywords currently works for Facebook SEO.
Further, if the real brand doesn’t have a page, you can easily create a page about it, just like the unhappy United Airlines customers. Witness the United Breaks Guitars video , which got 8.7 million views, as well as untied.com, which one very unhappy customer made. You can probably name your favorite high-profile examples of social media– AOL’s cancellation policy, BP’s PR failure, and so forth.
What This Means For You
- Get your Facebook fan page up and properly optimized — not just because you want to drive sales, but because you want to protect your name. This is just like someone owning your domain name. but they own your name on Facebook. If you let them build momentum– and negative sites spread like wildfire– you might be in for a nasty surprise. Our favorite examples to present at conferences have been Target.com and Dell.com, who until recently weren’t monitoring their fan pages and allowed unless streams of ex employees and unhappy customers to post negative reviews that went unanswered in a hatefest seen by millions of their fans. Ouch.
- Whoever has more fans wins — Notice in the Verizon example that it shows how many fans there are? Users are judging who is the real McCoy by fan count and how nice the profile picture is. In fact, when you post a fan page in your status, it automatically shows the fan count. Who says that size doesn’t matter?
- More fans equals more SEO power — A Facebook executive told me that SEO on Facebook is like regular SEO in the sense that more fans is more links to pass juice. Does this mean you should blindly try to acquire fans? No– you should still focus on ROI and conversions, but you should put in a minimum amount as insurance on your brand. If you invest in reputation management, consider this a like (no pun intended) investment.
- Your Facebook page may outrank your regular page in Google and Bing — Yes, because of Caffeine and the May Day update, stuff in Facebook is showing in regular search results. And as we’ve proven today, vice-versa. This is the first we’ve seen of items outside of Facebook now showing up in Facebook search. Look at the “source” to tell where it came from, such as this search on cottage cheese:
Notice the livestrong.com page that shows up. If this is not an incentive to tie into Facebook– because your regular webpages can show up in Facebook search and because your Facebook stuff shows up in regular search– not sure what is. Gaming Facebook search today is easy, just like Google was years ago.
WARNING
Some of the readers of allfacebook.com will now be tempted to go create a zillion fake pages and then link them together to pool juice. There will be Facebook SEO “experts” popping up to sell links, just like there are folks selling likes. In fact, any of the practices of traditional SEO will likely result in Facebook SEO. There are a few reasons why this is misguided and why you should disregard nearly everything you read about Facebook SEO up until this point (except for what you read on allfacebook.com, of course):
- Facebook search results are based on relevance to the user: Facebook’s engineering team explains it here. In other words, when you create an object and then search on it, of course it will show up in your Facebook search results. You are connected to it, in the same way that if you search “Keith Wilcox” (a daddy blogger), it will surface first the Keith Wilcoxs you know, then the Keith Wilcoxs that are in your area, connected to your friends, and so forth. Same is true for pizza or whatever term you type in. Certainly, Google is personalizing, but not to the same degree.
- People are searching for people on Facebook: They’re not search the same things on Google. Given that Facebook has created Community Pages and released global liking, that will change. But right now, I doubt more than a handful of people are searching on “viagra”, “local advertising company”, or “Las Vegas REO Speedwagon tickets”. The chicken and the egg issue is that Facebook’s search is people search and highly navigational– but once users see more pages for businesses, that may change search habits, too.
- Trust and influence factors are coming — Do you have that real world friend that seems to like everything? You know, the breathless one who say this was the best movie, best restaurant, best whatever? You know to discount him or her proportionate to how often they say this. Compare that to a normally reserved friend who rarely gets excited about anything, but then comes running up to you with some recommendation. You’ll probably listen. We have found that we can game Facebook by auto-liking objects– but I do not believe this to worth doing for several reasons. We have been openly testing it and told Facebook about it– so it’s clear they are designing against people who would abuse user trust, akin to that friend who shouts too much.
With regular SEO, the timeless practice is to create content that people (not robots) would actually enjoy and that deserves to be on the first page. Thus, with Facebook SEO, you want to do the same, which will then create organic links for you (likes from pages, friends, and fans) and boost you in the Facebook and Google search results. In the short-run, you can game the algorithm, but understand that these practices are short-lived.
Dennis Yu is Chief Executive Officer of BlitzLocal.com, a leading Facebook advertising agency serving brands and local service firms.
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This is like sites such as http://FBLike.net which allow you to like anything. You can easily get those like pages ranked for whatever you want.
Comment by Brian Krassenstein — June 28, 2010 @ 8:38 am
I don't get how you got it ranked for more than one keyword. Should it just show up for page name or the meta title?
Comment by ryan — June 28, 2010 @ 11:27 am
I read the post a couple times now…but I'm trying to find out how to actually do what you're suggesting.
My Brand has a Fan Page, and I have 4-5 other websites around this brand. I'm not sure how to take advantage of what you're talking about though.
Any tips?
Comment by Brian — June 28, 2010 @ 11:42 am
Of course it is easy to like something with one of these sites like FBLIKE, They are easy to do and spammers have been on this for months. If you like the page of course it is going to show first its common knowledge.
But really you are not ranked for some one who is not liking this page on a random site.
Another important factor is that Facebook owned properties are given priority over these sites.
But yeah Facebook SEO is an interesting area, I have been studying it for the last few months =)
Comment by James — June 28, 2010 @ 8:22 pm
The point is to get more likes to objects that you want to rank in Facebook as well as Google search results. This is Facebook SEO, where likes are equivalent to links.
Comment by Dennis Yu — June 29, 2010 @ 12:39 am
The title of your article is so misleading, it's not even funny. Nowhere in your article do you actually say what to do in order to rank high on FB. I had to read your article twice just to distill the essence (which you never actually state) that "likes" are the key here. I am not a FB expert and I already knew that, and could have actually explained it in only 2 sentences.
And please explain why your rogue Verizon page with only 245 likes ranks higher than pages following it that have way more likes? Something is nor right here.
Anyways, your recommendation to make fake pages is lame. You're encouraging spamming.
I just wasted 15 min of valuable time on this article.
Comment by Killa — June 29, 2010 @ 5:37 am
Ok, I get that part. So if I get my Fan Page more "Likes"…it will rank higher and higher in both places.
So, what about your strategy of creating multiple pages? And how could I use that strategy? Would I just create multiple pages within my market for different things so that I could, in effect, saturate my given arena?
Thanks again for the timely response.
Comment by Brian — June 29, 2010 @ 6:15 am
Also, you mention protecting your own brand/company. How would you go about optimizing your "page" (I'm assuming you mean Fan Page) so that you're appearing #1 for it?
Comment by Brian — June 29, 2010 @ 6:42 am
This is killer information, Dennis. Stoked that you're sharing hot tips like this and the Facebook advertising targeting tips.
Comment by Justin Kistner — June 29, 2010 @ 9:09 am
How long does it usually take for facebook to crawl your site?
Comment by Ryan — June 29, 2010 @ 9:28 am
This is really useful! Exciting times ahead for Facebook.
@brian you should use the Facebook plugins on your sites i.e. the like button and sharing buttons and advertise your fan page on your sites too. Include in your newsletters, on forum signatures, on your invoices! Anywhere and everywhere (plus your Twitter account too if you have one). Regards Emma
Comment by Emma Ewers — June 29, 2010 @ 11:22 am
Wow, saying that face book seo is like what was to optimize site for google years ago reflects, a) how far ahead Facebook has got, & b) what an opportunity it is right now.
Facebook urls also remind us Of the domain name gold rush years! Go get 'em!
Comment by Real estate website — June 29, 2010 @ 6:31 pm
@Ryan, I think your question is about how long it takes for Google to crawl your Facebook page, as opposed to how long it takes for your Facebook page to appear in Facebook search? To the latter, the results are nearly instant. To the former, it can be days. Love to hear what others experience.
@Justin Kistner– pleasure to connect. I didn't realize that you spoke at emetrics, too. Ping me and I'll shoot you my deck from eMetrics Sydney on how to measure and optimize to cost per fan and revenue per fan.
@Brian– the strategy on one page versus multiple Facebook pages is akin to whether you'd have one domain or multiple domains. If the topics are reasonably different, as well as the audience, choose a new domain. But know that the more domains or pages you make, the more work you have and more sites to manage. Better to have 1 Facebook page that has 100,000 fans than 100 pages of 1,000 fans each– you want to cross community.
If you have more questions, we just set up a forum at community.blitzlocal.com. I will answer all questions there.
Comment by Dennis Yu — July 2, 2010 @ 12:21 am
Denis,
This sounds great and extremely valuable, but you are assuming that people are engineers to understand your post. I'm glad that I wasn't the only reader that read and reread your post to try to grock your instructions. I went over to community.blitzlocal.com to see more information, but I don't see which forum you are answering questions about this article in. Can you post the exact url for the forum here please?
Thank you for sharing!
Comment by Peggy Dolane — July 2, 2010 @ 8:47 pm
OK, so in FaceBook search the major factor which gives power to a search item is the number of fans? I think FB will add some more criteria otherwise spamming will increase. Some thing like the profile is fake or not and how valuable the information etc..
Comment by Siju — July 8, 2010 @ 9:10 pm
@Siju: Fan count is one of many important factors, just like in regular SEO. It's not just how many links, but the quality of them and the influence of those people. #1 factor in Facebook search is proximity, not fan count.
@Peggy Dolane– yes, these posts are written at the engineering level. My goal is to explain the concepts in simple English for business users and then go into semi-technical detail to prove it.
As for asking questions in http://community.blitzlocal.com, just post your question where it makes the most sense. As people as more questions, we'll create more categories. It's brand new, so right now you have your best shot at getting questions answered by us.
Comment by Dennis Yu — July 9, 2010 @ 5:47 pm
I have been looking for information like this about facebook seo thank for sharing
Great work!
Comment by Anthony Johnson — September 20, 2011 @ 12:25 am
This is sound information. FB is now more popular
than ever, and getting links from such site can
only be beneficial if done in the proper way.
Comment by Portabadge — October 15, 2011 @ 9:05 am
FB is very popular social networking site. can we use facebook for branding?
Comment by vivian — December 5, 2011 @ 5:05 am