Your Facebook goes Google

When Facebook ‘announced’ to open its user profiles to be crawlable for search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. on its internal blog on September 5th, there was a lot of uproar going on about it. Searchengineland took on an elaborate analysis of the subject and even though it quickly turned out that this actually isn’t such a new feature on the Facebook site, the biggest issues remains weather or not the default setting for this was and will be set ‘on’ or ‘off’ in the user profile settings.

Danny Sullivan of Searchengineland states:

As far as I can tell, Facebook members who never intended or expected to be listed this
way were suddenly opted-in to Facebook’s new plan. I say “as far as I can tell” because
despite several attempts over the past week, Facebook has failed to provide me with
any official answers.

Crawlable public profiles could be a big deal for Facebook since it will certainly send more traffic their way. And for people who would like to upgrade Google hits on their name or company it will probably do a nice job too since Facebook will rank high as trusted site.

To opt out from public search listings simply go to the privacy settings for search in your profile
or watch how it’s done in this report on currentTV.

Contributed by Marco Raab of Blank Mosseri