Search Engine SPAM With Facebook (Round 2)

In early November Google promoted their ability to execute AJAX/JS to index some dynamic comments.  A few years ago, Jed Singer and I did some digging to see just how well Facebook pages were crawled and indexed.  The answer – not very well, but Facebook still enjoyed decent rankings for profile and brand pages alike, despite spidering issues.  Our review suggested a heavy dose of domain authority and backlinking signals, and not necessarily on-page relevance.  

Then, suddenly, Facebook pages started to show up less and less (somewhere around the time “Google Me” was the rumor) except for specific people and brand searches.  I assumed a manual algorithm tweak to clean up the search engine result pages, and make general Facebook pages less of a player.  The same kind you saw with Digg pages, Amazon subdomains, etc.

But when I read that Google is getting better at interpreting Facebook comments, I assumed they also got better at reading all Facebook’s public tabbed content.  Still, I assumed they wouldn’t change their algorithm suppressing Facebook rankings. 

Wrong…

This is one of several examples I found.  It worried me about my long-tail for my websites, and sure enough, Facebook SERP SPAM there too.  I don’t know if Google took their eye of their algorithm and made some changes without considering their prior intention, or if this is a real decision (can’t imagine why, though).  I expect it won’t last long.

In the meantime, black hats will go at it, and white hats (and shoppers) will need to be annoyed by it. What a thoughtful holiday gift, Google!