Facebook Has a Google Penalty?
So a few weeks ago I ran a little experiment where I allowed my facebook public profile to be indexed by the search engines, I dropped a few links to it (from this blog and from my Sphinn profile) and then watched it outrank my profile page on the Distilled site. I was shocked by how quickly it ranked and how highly it ranked (although after seeing wikipedia all over the place I can’t say I was that surprised…).
Here’s my follow up after I’d spotted it ranking
And now, I just checked again (yeah, I’m vain. Deal with it.) and my facebook public listing is nowhere to be found. That’s odd, I thought. Maybe Facebook has removed my public profile or perhaps it’s fallen out of Google’s index. I checked and nope, the page is still indexed and listed in the index.
A google.co.uk search for tom critchlow (my facebook page nowhere to be found)
A google.co.uk search for tom critchlow public profile (again, nowhere to be found)
A google.co.uk search for tom critchlow face book (you’d really think it’d be there for this one!)
A google.co.uk search for tom critchlow facebook (and now, proving that it is indexed and can still show for some queries here is my profile)
Now normally, to check and see if there is a penalty on a website’s rankings you’d run some searches for exact phrases in the title tags of some of it’s prominent pages. Unfortunately, I’m having difficulty finding an appropriate page to run searches on. The main facebook site still ranks for [facebook] and [face book].
Is there a penalty on Facebook? Do they care?! Well, probably not since they weren’t taking advantage of this before (see my earlier post) but I still wouldn’t be surprised if this resulted in a noticeable dip in traffic for them (assuming this happened across the board).
Anyone else have any public profiles indexed? Tried Googling yourself recently?
If you have enjoyed this post you can subscribe to the rss feed to read more about how you can monitor and protect your brand online
Comment link
Chris Bennett on Mon (3 Sep) @ 4:18 pm
I doubt it is a Facebook vs. Google thing and more of a too much or too high exact anchor text ratio. Google is hitting harder than ever on that. Or it is a supplemental problem.
That would be my guess.
Comment link
Chris Paston on Tue (4 Sep) @ 1:58 pm
“Tried Googling yourself recently?”
I do it every day and my palms are getting more hairy by the day.
It’ll be an interesting experiment to run and I’ll definitely have a go once my blog is up and running (coming to you in Summer 2037).
As a side note, typing my name into Google currently brings up the agency I work for despite the fact that my name is nowhere on the site… (someone more paranoid - and less versed in anchor text - would be worried by now).
Comment link
Tom Critchlow on Tue (4 Sep) @ 2:34 pm
@Chris - wait, that’s not going to work…
@C Bennett - I’m not convinced there’s a Google penalty for facebook either and my best guess would be supplemental as well (although even if it IS supplemental it’s still interesting cos don’t google claim to be ranking supplemental pages? Yet this page doesn’t rank even for very specific queries.)
@C Paston - Lol, yeah I Google myself FAR too much to be healthy. I sometimes wake up in cold sweats imagining who might be ranking for my name. If you’re worried about your agency turning up for a search on your name then commenting here won’t help your case! (nonofollow here don’tchaknow) and also getting links from SEOmoz posts won’t help either! Can’t believe you still don’t have a blog, hope you get it sorted soon - drop me a line when it’s up!
Comment link
Will Critchlow on Tue (4 Sep) @ 5:15 pm
Ummm. I think comments are nofollowed by wordpress, actually…
Comment link
Tom Critchlow on Wed (5 Sep) @ 8:56 am
Hmm - good point will. They don’t show up using my ‘display nofollow’ script tho. Time to get me a new script I think!
Comment link
Facebook Public Profiles Actually To Become Public? | Distilled blog on Wed (5 Sep) @ 9:38 am
[…] Search Engine Land « Facebook Has a Google Penalty? […]
Comment link
Dominating the SERPs by Adam Taylor - Conversion Matters on Fri (2 Nov) @ 5:42 pm
[…] I just saw a couple of posts on the distilled blog about getting your facebook profile […]