Facebook has revamped the public profiles for users and their are some noticeable changes. First of all, Facebook has increased the number of visible friends for an individual from 5 to 7. Even more significant is the increase in the number of visible fan pages, from 5 to 20. This means brand pages will receive more more SEO juice. It also appears that those fan page listings on public profiles are static.

So why on earth would Facebook be providing so much information on the public page? Easy, they want more search engine traffic. Getting traffic from Google can be pretty addictive and Facebook knows this better than anyone. While you can argue that the company wants to attract more traffic to brands, I’d suggest that it’s a fairly self-serving activity.

There is a direct correlation between the number of pages you have indexed on a website and the amount of traffic you receive. While there are other variables that come into play, search engine visibility is one of the most important factors in driving up your site traffic. That’s why Facebook has round 200 million pages indexed in Google. Compare that with MySpace who has approximately 235 million pages indexed and Yahoo who has over 400 million pages indexed.

So do brands really benefit from having what would originally be traffic to their own site, go to Facebook? For large companies, I don’t really see the benefit but for small companies it definitely makes sense to set up a page, especially if they don’t have resources for SEO. I would guess that a larger portion of Facebook’s traffic comes from people searching for names.

My mom for instance doesn’t have a website but she does have her Facebook profile which shows up second in Google. For someone who doesn’t spend time building her own site, this is a great way to get indexed. Thanks to Jovan Radisaljevic for the tip.