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Facebook Impact on Google Search
Piepgrass also explained a new feature of Facebook Places and Music, which we will see more and more of: followed links. What’s a followed link? In search engine optimization, links from other sites are critical to better rankings. They’re like votes of confidence, and not all votes are equal. Votes from authoritative sites like Facebook are better. And Google introduced nofollow links in 2005 as a way of combating blog spam. Links are considered followed by default, but webmasters could add a nofollow value to links, which would lead Google to value that link less. As a result, search engine optimizers prize followed links—and that makes the prospect of being able to secure followed links from Facebook extremely appealing.
The big question is how to get those followed links to appear. As Piepgrass explained to me, “They occur when appropriate open graph tags are in place, and the site has social plugins in place. Ranking within the box of links is based on total and value of edges.” That leaves a lot of questions, but that’s a familiar story to those of us who’ve worked with Google and Facebook over the last decade. We have enough information to know it’s worth creating those edges between Facebook and websites.