Facebook Changes May Endanger SEO
If you’ve recently tried to update your Facebook settings, you might have noticed that once again, everything has changed. The layout is different, and the groups you spent so much time choosing? Gone from your profile page. And that’s only the beginning of what has turned out to be quite a major overhaul.
More importantly, however, Facebook has started to like a lot more things. In fact, now Facebook likes almost everything.
As of last week, Facebook has begun to give websites the option to install “Like” buttons, from which the websites can drive traffic—every “Like” posts an update to that user’s page. What does this mean? Effectively, it means that Facebook may slowly be transforming the internet into an SEO-resistant open-graph. Google is, understandably, starting to worry.
Proponents of the change argue that ‘social links’ are better than ‘normal links’ as they provide individual users with customizable browsing experiences, something never seen before. Yet Google stands to lose big: its algorithm, which relies on links between sites to determine page rankings (factors that strongly determine the success of a website) will not have access to any of Facebook’s data. What it basically comes down to: Facebook may become better positioned to rank the internet than Google. This wouldn’t be a problem if websites and individual users refused to participate and continued to use the internet as before. But it’s been a little over a week and more than 50,000 sites have already opted-in.
Though the change may seem innovative (if not a bit Big Brother-esque), opponents have raised questions about the future of internet openness. What happens when a single website controls access to links between websites and users, and the open graph becomes the web’s most integral feature? The results, concerning both fairness and privacy, could potentially be disastrous.
In the end, although social media is our passion, we at Abrams Research may have to hold judgment on Facebook’s latest decision. For only after the initial firestorm dies down (and people choose to adopt or reject Facebook’s expansion) will we truly be able to see the extent to which the open graph affects the internet and the way we use it.
[Courtesy of CNN]
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