Will Facebook Likes Affect SEO?

This morning, while reading an article on CNN.com, I started reading and thought… Wow…
Someone finally get’s it….

I bet there’s a handful of people thinking that Pete’s comments were a little out there.. I mean, seriously, Facebook users affect how Google ranks a web page? Why would that harm anything… Well, it will.

He’s 100% right. However, he’s missing a key ingredient to his discussion here, something I’m willing to wager few have thought of in addition to his queries and suggestions.

Peter suggests that Facebook “likes” could seriously harm the Google algorithm as the current algorithm judges popularity of a page by the number of inbound links from other websites pointing to it.

However, this is really only PART of the algorithm and a very vague description at best.

With folks now using the Facebook “Like” feature to share and discuss new favorite websites and posts, why would they want to “Link” to a page in a voting style fashion on blogs or other media to share it with their friends while at the same time giving a thumbs up toward the page, when simply clicking “like” exercises the same move?

Sociology has proven that users take the least difficult path, and thus with books like Stephen Krug’s “Don’t make me think”, it’s pretty obvious that Facebook’s 500Million+ users will likely begin using the like button and linking to web pages LESS….

Why even an OpenLink won’t fix Google’s Problem…

Already there are calls to create an “OpenLike” standard that’s accessible to all, reports Facebook watcher Nick O’Neill. However, Google Engineers will quickly point out that even if Facebook gave complete and total access to their systems and user data tommorow, the challenge would not end there… Likes cannot replace links algorithmically…

When Google evaluates a link, it looks at the age of the domain name it’s coming from, the links pointing TO that domain and the general authority it has. It also looks at how long the link has pointed to the other site, and what text it uses to describe the website or resource it’s pointing to. It also can gather information from the text around the link how relavent it is in relation to other content.

Likes and Algorithms…

The new question, one likely to be asked in 2011, will be this… How do you give weight or authority to a Facebook profile or twitter profile? One might instantly think this is easy… By stating the number of friends… A guy with 60,000 Twitter followers, or perhaps 2500 Facebook friends is clearly a leader in his field or a well known and trusted person.. However this simply isn’t accurate either… Because with the advent of “Follow Me-Follow You” groups on Twitter, and Facebook “add-me” groups, folks are gathering 1000′s of friends at a rapid pace already… Perhaps by combining time a user’s been registered with types of related friends or some idea could finally solve it… But it doesn’t exist yet.. IF you could even get your hands on that data.

Perhaps in 2011, Google tries to take over Facebook, or even more interesting, form a partnership for access to some sort of API that would give them the trust signals neccesary to place a weight on one “Like” vs another… Because certainly a like from a socially well known person like Britney Spears could be much more valuable than your next door neighbour who has 60 friends (4 of which don’t have his last name).

Regardless, Likes are going to become very dangerous to the Google way of ranking pages and the accuracy of Google’s judgement on what’s HOT and what’s not… Especially without access to the most freshest source of user approvals and popularities…

Thoughts? Voice in on the comments, bookmark this and most of all.. Like it!