Someone asked me the other day – “I know I’ll get some traffic from FB by implementing Like buttons on my content. But will it help me in terms of SEO rankings ?”

Well, if you are talking about Google rankings – nopes, it wont help, at least not as of now. But, keep two facts in mind –
a) Although Facebook search is at a puny 2.7% of US search market right now according to this article, its growing at a rapid pace. And, its already bigger than AOL.
b) Facebook and Bing have a good thing going. Bing powers Facebooks web search – there may be data partnerships we don’t know about. Remember the miniscule stake picked up by MSFT in Facebook at a valuation which seemed overblown at that point of time ? Was there a footnote to that deal w.r.t having access to some specific types of data ? Time will tell.

What I am trying to get at is this – alternatives to Google search could emerge in terms of Facebook’s search, leveraging data from the open graph API implementations by content owners. Also, Bing search results might use Facebook like data to determine link relevance. Or maybe someone else who partners with FB.

There is a distinct possibility of a very different approach to search being used by either Facebook or any of its partners it can share data with – instead of using links to a page to determine reputation/authority, search results may get determined by the number of likes a page has received in order to come up on top on search results. My recommendation would be to be prepared for it and implement like buttons on your content. The world of SEO could look very different in a year or two !

I know what you are thinking – using “like” information for figuring out reputation of a page might lead to “like spamming” – well, there are a ton of approaches I can think of to prevent that from impacting search results – I think its actually easier to detect “like spamming” (because the history of the user like-ing the content could be made available to the search engine) than link spamming – will talk about some ideas on how to do that, in a future post.

Maybe we will stop worrying about the pagerank of pages we get backlinks from, and start thinking about “influencer ranks” and hope those guys like what we put out as content. Another reason you should use this facebook sharing tracker to stay on top of the game.

Try our free seo analysis tool for other interesting insights on seo improvement opportunities.

We had a real case study with some real numbers as well – have taken out those slides.