Mediarun Search Marketing News

Facebook gets more SEO friendly

April 23rd 2010

Search Engine Optimisation News

Facebook has just held its latest developers' conference at the San Francisco Design Centre and a number of important search engine optimisation issues were brought to light.

For those not able to attend the US developers and search engine marketing seminar hosted by the world's most popular social networking website, Facebook did the courtesy of streaming the event live via its website.

Developers were gathered together to discuss the "future of personalised and social technologies" as well as their impact on the field of SEO and marketing.

Business growth, open-source software and technological advancements were all on the agenda, but the most important issue covered at the F8 event was the impact the latest Facebook updates would have on search engine optimisation.

The company's chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg and lead developer Bret Taylor introduced a number of updates, including a bookmarking feature called the 'Like' button.

As well as allowing Facebook users to give feedback to marketers, it is suspected that the 'Like' button will be integrated into search engine algorithms, meaning that businesses which incorporate social networking into their SEO strategies have another channel with which to boost their marketing material up Google's search engine results pages.

Earlier this year, Google started showing Facebook status updates on its listings. The firm had already incorporated Tweets and MySpace pages into its search engine rankings prior to offering its users Facebook updates. However, Facebook has close ties to Microsoft - which runs rival search service Bing - and the amount of data Google has access to is limited.

Industry news provider VentureBeat said at the time: "Microsoft has the ability to index public status updates, while Google's access is limited to updates from Pages, which are vehicles for marketing rather than personal content.

"Still, Facebook Pages are a rapidly growing part of the site. There are more than three million active ones on the social network, with a total of 5.3 billion fans. No money exchanged hands in either search deal with Facebook, the company told us when the agreements were made."

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