The last 7 days have been a huge week for SEO gurus. A few days ago, Facebook confirmed that they are testing search results which display articles ranked by likes. And then on September 8, Google announced the new feature – Google Instant that could make searching faster but also can affect SEO significantly. If Facebook continues developing its search engine, it will soon become the Google’s fear and more importantly, SEO men would have to learn different ways to optimize their sites for Facebook and get used to a new term, PeopleRank.
Google PageRank
PageRank is the most important and reliable factor to evaluate a webpage. PR could bring more organic traffic to your site as it determines ranking of your page in Google search results. It is not the only ranking factor, but it is the important one.
Google says that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. To improve pagerank for your webpage, you will need to understand the idea behind its concept.
As getting quality back links from high PR sites is so difficult and costly, newbie bloggers are getting into building a big number of links from sites with lower PR. Obviously Google also realizes this and assign lower weights to these links. Although you need a lot more low PR links to increase page rank, they are still necessary and valuable. However, you shouldn’t be crazy commenting, buying or exchange links because your pages could be picked up as spam links.
Facebook PeopleRank
It seems like nothing can stop Facebook developing its social graph search engine. Recently, Facebook is displaying all liked news in search results. At the moment, they only appear in the drop down of Facebook’s search box, however the Facebook’s search area will soon undergo a significant revamp.
This new search shows how important Facebook’s Open Graph is to the future of the company. It not only indicates the competition between Facebook and Google but also illustrates how the PeopleRank with “like” is most definitely positioned to replacing the Pagerank with “link”.
In my point, there’s nothing that can replace Google at the moment but getting results according to your friend’s like can be a good thing. Remember that link-derived PageRank is only one of over 200 factors in Google ranking algorithm, so Facebook still has a lot of work ahead to compete with Google.
You’re right about things changing in SEO. Both of these have a pretty large impact and are giving us a glimpse of how things will be shifting in the near future. It seems like facebook is weighing the amount an article is shared well over the number of times it’s liked. I’m interested to see if this current algorithm is kept or tweaked to increase the authority likes have.
Thanks for sharing your opinion, Brian.
At the moment, search results in Facebook is available for articles shared by your direct friends and they are not ranked only by the number of likes. I think Facebook will continue to develop it so that results could be shown globally to all users with some privacy settings.
What about SEO women? Do women do SEO too?
haha, do I need to edit the post? I mean men and women here.
Lol I don’t think Facebook has enough potential to catch up with Google in the search area yet. Facebook doesn’t have web page search or note search yet and most of the searches generated on Facebook is targeted, means that you have some basic info about things you want to search before you do the search. What do you think?
Yeah, it is quite difficult for Facebook. I heard that they are launching a separate search page but it is really not viable. Google is preparing to add a social layer to its search result, so I think Facebook should not spend much time to compete with Google in search engine market.
Facebook, as I found, is more concerned with what is more closer to the interest of person who searches looking at his/her network, likes and so on whereas Google (though it recently started to implement interest based search) focuses more on relevancy of page on the keyword searched. So, still the result of these two different sectors of services will differ.
I feel, Facebook is going to hit the market harder as it has more data not only geographical and history, but also age group, sex, hobbies, likes and dislikes, country, city and OMH! EVERYTHING? It will be easier to target the required group of people on Facebook. This is going to give Facebook and immence extra advantage.
This will be interesting, a battle between the two most popular websites, who will win
My money is on Google but let’s wait and see…
Certainly one to watch closely as new marketing opportunities will more than likely come from these two giants competing.
Karl
No doubt that all of these are happening right now. Facebook is actually moving one step forward to possibly compete with Google in that case right? My personal view about this matter…the connection of facebook users and how these users influence one another are important points needed to improve ones page rank in facebook.
I am not fear abt Ranking. Remember “Content Is King.” So focus on Content rather than SEO.