Lollipop Local

Interesting article from Web Pro News about whether Google should be worried that Facebook is now doing Search.

My own opinion is that the answer to that is no. Facebook’s search facility for its own properties is very unreliable – unless you’re looking for something you have found and liked in the past. Sometimes, even when you’ve been somewhere before, Facebook won’t show it to you again when you type it into the search bar.

It also seems to struggle when there are lots of people with the same name. Unless they have a profile pic, you’ve got no chance. And, even then, you may not be shown all the possible candidates for your search.

It’s even worse when you have liked a page as your personal profile and then you want to like it as your business page. Sometimes you have to go to the hassle of going back through your likes and copying the url so that you can paste it into the search bar of the other profile/page.

Exploiting Facebook Search

The realisation that Facebook Search is going to happen was brought home to us when a company called us offering to set up a Search Page. A what? It transpired that this is a keyword and location rich Business Page designed purely to take advantage of the Search possibilities and put your name and address in front of potential searchers.

Whilst, in theory, this is a good idea and one which the pioneers of Facebook SEO used to good effect, I’m not sure how long Facebook are going to allow such practices to continue in the modern era. You could end up with hundreds of very similar poor quality copy cat pages with slightly different keywords against the same location.

It’s a repeat of Google’s algorithm changes to fight scammers waiting to happen.

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 14th, 2012 at 11:09 am and is filed under Facebook, Local SEO, Social Media and SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.