Google Makes Facebook Pages a Higher Priority for Businesses

by Les Kollegian

Chris Crum reported for Web Pro News that Google is finally getting the biggest missing piece in real-time search. At Jacob Tyler, we are doing our best daily to make our clients aware of the importance of Social Networking (Social Media) as a part of their marketing mix. This is even more proof that developing “Fan Pages” in Facebook wil increase the possibility of first page placement for your Web site or business organic search results as explained below.

Google announced via Twitter this week, that public status updates from Facebook are now included in the search engine’s real-time search feature. That means the largest social network in the world is getting play in Google’s real-time search alongside Twitter, MySpace, and others, and these real-time results are often featured prominently on the first page of search results for the hottest queries.

Apparently only updates from Facebook PAGES are indexed. This includes links, status updates, photos, videos shared by page owners (not comments made by the fans). Any Facebook update (from regular user profiles) can be shared publicly, so I wonder why these aren’t being pulled. Results from Twitter and other places aren’t only from branded sources.

This seems to indicate that brands should be getting a good amount of play for Facebook appearances in Google’s real-time search results, and possibly in the real-time search results in general (due to Facebook’s huge user-base). Right now, Facebook isn’t dominating the results, but that is bound to change with it being the largest (by far) social network on the web.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 28th, 2010 at 10:04 am and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.