Anyone who has tried to build a Fan Page on Facebook or use its advertising tools has wondered how to rank highly when people search using a Facebook search tool. AimClear, a Minnesota-based SEO research company, has published its third report on Facebook SEO Ranking Factors. Lauren Litwinka, aimClear's publications director, summarized the report in her blog.
According to Litwinka, Facebook's piece of the online search engine pie is still small at 2.7% of all U.S. searches, compared to Google's 64% share. It is growing rapidly, however, having achieved a 48% increase in the past year. Facebook has now surpassed 500 million users and is growing fast.
Litwinka succinctly describes the problem: "Understanding why Application X ranks above Event Y but below Branded Fan Page Z (which, almost inconceivably, ranks below Community Page Q...) is vital knowledge for any company, community manager, advertiser or developer investing serious time & money in this unparalleled social frontier."
What affects rank, and consequently search results is the personalization within your page: the pages you decide to "like", the groups you join, the applications you use, the events you attend and the places you discuss or visit. "It" in the following discussion refers to a page, group, event, app, place, etc. on FB. The type of things that impact personalization are whether you and your friends like "it," whether you're invited to it, whether you've visited it before, and whether you've listed it as an interest.
The Autocomplete box, located in the middle of the FB page masthead, is the all-purpose search box. It will return 0 to 8 results, depending on what you type in, how new you are to FB, and how complete your personalization is within the community. Just like in Google, the autocomplete will try to populate with suggested results. Once you hit enter, you are taken to the number one result. What seems to rank in autocomplete are: your own profile with that name, events you are invited to, friends with that keyword in their name, and then a friend of a friend with keyword in the name. After that come questions with the keyword in it, and apps that you've used with that keyword. Down the list of what ranks are groups you've joined, pages you liked, pages relating to your interests, and a page a friend likes.
The "All Results" box used to be the de facto FB search hub until Autocomplete came along. Now only new users with no feed to bring about autocomplete results need to use All Results for a search results page. The order of ranking for All Results currently seems to be: people with keyword in name; pages with keyword in page; posts with keyword in post; followed by Bing search results outside of FB.
This is how aimClear sees it right now, but stay tuned for later updates. Facebook, like Google, is constantly tweaking those algorithms presumably to improve results and to make FB more useful.
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