Years ago when Google began dominating the search industry, one of the biggest challenges for the search engines was discovering link farms. As Wikipedia describes, “a link farm is any group of web sites that all hyperlink to every other site in the group”. It was also an extremely effective technique for spamming search engines and boosting placement for various keywords. Now developers have created similar sites except instead of linking to places, the site encourages users to like objects.
As Dennis Yu illustrated this morning, there’s a significant opportunity to create link farms right now because Facebook doesn’t have any restrictions in place … yet. Facebook search is extremely early in its evolution. Just last week we began noticing occurrences of results that link to sites outside of Facebook. Once we confirmed that all Open Graph objects show up in search, it became abundantly clear that this evolution of Facebook search competes directly with Google.
While users are mostly searching Facebook for their friends currently, users will begin to search for more generic topics as Facebook slowly changes user behavior. Right now, showing up for the phrase “discount travel” won’t necessarily benefit you, however as Facebook improves their search product and users begin to understand that they can search for things other than their friends, ranking high on various keywords will become increasingly important.
In the meantime, the numerous “like farms” that are spamming Facebook with random quotes and phrases (like Likey.net, LikeItPage, and others) will continue to proliferate until Facebook develops a system that determine which add value and which are just spam generators. Have you seen many sites like the ones listed? Do you think like farms are just for spam or are actually useful?
![[Inside Social Apps 2012]](http://www.allfacebook.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/allfacebook2/images/ISA2012_336x100_F_RegisterNow.gif)
![[AllFacebook Stats: Facebook Analytics for Your Business]](http://www.allfacebook.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/allfacebook2/images/stpro_allfacebookstats.gif)
![[How can Facebook change your business?]](http://www.allfacebook.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/allfacebook2/images/FMB_A_MAY2011_336x100_F.gif)
I saw a site http://tampa.likethislocal.com/ that groups things in a city for people to like. Basically just posts businesses and collects likes.
Comment by Adam J. Stahura — June 28, 2010 @ 8:45 am
Reading and liking anything is spam?
Or is clicking like is spam? Like is a limited way of defining what a user fancies users would love to express them selves apart from just re-sharing and liking existing articles online there's a lot to say about things one user likes. It works both way but you can't have it both ways either. The Internet is driven by what people like to browse and what they like to share what people do on social networks is entirely up to them. Now ofcourse since most development efforts take on a limited number of programmers to deal with development issues. How users can grade items can be new currency online for hordes and droves.Even bot's can find that useful.
Comment by Spencer Tom Tafadzwa — June 28, 2010 @ 8:57 am
nick,
you're right. but i also think lots of people don't understand what they are agreeing to by Liking anything/everything conceivable.
Comment by Brian Breslin — June 28, 2010 @ 9:15 am
I don't see how this will ultimately help out a marketer or someone who is needing to acquire a crap ton of likes. From a quick peak at these sites it just looks like you get likes to your personal profile. I guess you can create a profile for your business but that doesn't really help out visibility to your page or business.
Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see why getting 5000 likes to my personal page does anything for me. I would love your insight and to show me where I'm being small minded.
@thescottbishop
Comment by Scott Bishop — June 28, 2010 @ 9:47 am
I think like farms are just spam!
Comment by ravi — June 28, 2010 @ 9:45 pm
@Scott,
Think of likes as links in the social world– you're passing juice so you can rank on both Facebook and Google search. For those that do SEO professionally, the value is immediately apparent.
Comment by Dennis Yu — June 29, 2010 @ 12:38 am
nobody "likes" me =(
Comment by nicko — June 29, 2010 @ 3:40 am
Well, as someone coming from SEO to the world of SMM – I completely understand what you're aiming at.
Facebook search ahs a long-long way to go till it reaches the level Google search has reached – if ever, and till then – we're all subjected to SPAM.
To me it feels like this is a step down from the spam-free world Google have managed to create for us within their search result pages, but if Facebook will be smart enough to do what Google do and use crowdsourcing along with a fine search algorithm – we'll all benefit.
I wonder who will be the first to combine a spam-free search algorithm with the wisdom of the crowd..
Comment by Michal Moreno — June 30, 2010 @ 3:36 am
Cool Michal, my comment "nobody likes me" probably helped this article's SEO huh? =P
Comment by nicko — August 2, 2010 @ 12:08 pm
also form me.. it's spam
Comment by dotgolf — October 19, 2011 @ 4:32 am
[...] a user runs across your content and clicks on the handy little button beside it, that action is published on their profile [...]
Pingback by Triple Your Website Traffic: More Facebook Likes — October 20, 2011 @ 11:20 am
attractive tips, very good tips for my situation..
related to in every case normally requires this post.
Comment by gadget | technology — November 16, 2011 @ 8:41 am
Looking for a "like" ?? Like my page and I will return the favor. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Movers-MovingNET/25...
http://www.facebook.com/pages/MoversLosAngelesNET...
Comment by Movers — January 23, 2012 @ 3:44 pm