Facebook is launching a new public feature allowing anybody to search for, and view, your Facebook profile page.
Users will be able to opt out of this feature but the net result is that profile pages will start to appear in the results of Google, Yahoo and MSN.
At present there are around 26,500 profiles indexed in Google as a result of other sites linking directly to them. Facebook have not been actively blocking indexing or encouraging it using internal links.
Once Facebook offers ways for the search engines to spider the site it is a fair assumption they will want to make sure it is properly indexed. Several “people search engines” such as Spock.com have been springing up recently and will no doubt be worried at this news. Once Google indexes Facebook there really will be no need for a people search engine.
Will Facebook rank highly in Google?
Facebook has 18.5 million incoming links. Wikipedia has 47 million so it is fair to assume it won’t stuggle with rankings. Wikipedia features at the top of almost every search term you can think of at present.
Expect Facebook to feature in the top 3 results for 90% of people you search for within 3 months.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Glad to see you’ve been bitten by the blogging about facebook bug! I’ve been following the progress of these public profiles for a while now and it’ll be very interesting to see how they get all these pages indexed and ranking.
hmm… actually i think Spock will likely benefit from now being able to index Facebook profiles just like Google will, only moreso.
Google only competes with services like Spock to the extent they understand & aggregate data around people profiles. while they can certainly start doing that, they haven’t been doing so to date (at least publicly).
As with Microsoft in the past, Google doesn’t win every race it’s in… but sometimes people announce them the winner before they even start
[full disclosure: i'm an advisor to Spock, however these opinions are my own.]
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