Let’s take a closer look at how content is organised within Facebook’s news feed and how it can potentially affect SEO. It’s easy to assume that the newest posts are always delivered to the top of the page in your Facebook news feed, look carefully and you will notice this isn’t quite true.
Facebook have their own scoring system called EdgeRank, which is based on an algorithm that assesses the importance of posts based on three key factors :
- Affinity – Affinity score between the user and creator
- Weight – For example, comments will be given more priority over Likes
- Time – A fresh Edge is given priority, pretty obvious really
Facebook defines every item that shows in your feed as an Object, whenever there is an interaction with the object it is called an Edge.
Unlike Twitter which is purely time based, it’s clear that EdgeRank is designed to intelligently organise the vast amount of information that exists on Facebook. With Facebook Comments now being visible to search engines the aim is to achieve a high level of interaction with your posts and encourage sharing. Not only does this help your content appear prominently on your members feeds but also makes it more visible to search engines. A double whammy!
Note that Google will only crawl public posts to Fan/Business pages and these are made available throughout search results.
My advice to SME’s is to concentrate on building good contacts to their Facebook Business pages aiming for regular interaction through posting good content and engaging users. If you have understood EdgeRank you will see why this is so important and the potential to help with your general online marketing strategy.
Feel free to ask any questions below in the comments box, hopefully this get’s crawled too.
