Facebook as a Search Engine Optimization Tool.

As Stonehewer mentioned in a previous post the popularity of Serious Business at UNBC has primarily came from links on Facebook. However, it is not clear as to exactly how Facebook has benefited us

Linking through Facebook on individual profiles or statuses does not help SEO in terms of link building. This is because personal profiles are not index able by search engines because they are hidden behind your login. However, group and event pages (assuming they are not closed) are an exception as they are not hidden behind a login and therefore are able to be crawled by search engine. In our case (Serious Business at UNBC), this has been the UNBC JDC West Facebook page. Unfortunately this still does not help the page rank as it does not supply a proper back link. But why?

Facebook and almost all social networking sites add a no follow value to every link posted on their site, essentially what this tag does is tell the website crawlers that “Our website does not vouch for this site” therefore no rating is given. Due to this, Facebook is inefficient as a tool for internet marketers to build links, and therefore has not benefited the blog in that sense

What Facebook is good at doing for internet marketers is generating a lot of traffic for the site. Over 90% of our traffic has come from Facebook so it has certainly done a good job. SEO is not a hard science and there are conflicting opinions as to if traffic improves page rank, but one piece of evidence that supports traffics impact is the fact that 10 minutes after the beginning of class, our rank had moved up 2 positions without any new content being added or changed. This could be due to the influx of visits by our internet marketing class. Another benefit of Facebook is the awareness it can create for the site, this can then translate into link building as people link your blog to their actual site or blog if they find the information interesting.