Is Facebook Indexing Public Posts? -

Is Facebook Indexing Public Posts?

30 September 2011

4 Comments

3,195 Views

Facebook
Google +
Google Plus
Social Search

In times of social search wars, we see a lot of pressure on social platforms to innovate, stay creative and keep sustainability within their platforms. Google+ has certainly created a cat and mouse game with Facebook, especially with their sleek circle features and “Hangouts”. Another tidbit many may not know is that Google+ indexes public posts, based on an algorithm of course, that we wrote about in July, 2011.

Well, it appears something similar in this “social search” war is now happening with Facebook. This morning I received a Google Alert for “Ty Downing” from a Facebook post…yes, a “Post” as you can see by the images below. Now we know Google includes Groups, Notes and Business Pages into it’s SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages), but this is either a freak thing, or Facebook is trying to add to the pushing and shoving. I have reached out to Facebook to add clarity to this, so we’ll see what happens or if we get any feedback. If this is true, this could be a major move to “social search optimization” for Facebook. Of course this depends on how Google would choose and rank Facebook posts. I checked BING, and Blekko for similar cache of my Facebook posts, but none of them appear (For the moment) to index Facebook public “Timeline” posts.

Thoughts? Have you seen anything similar? If this is true, how do you view this move?