and all I got was this idea about Facebook local search engine optimization

In a previous post I stated that Facebook Local could end up being a very important marketing opportunity for you business. Since then, thousands of businesses have created Facebook Pages – simple templates to create a page about your service that can be promoted via Facebook’s social network.

In principle the more networked your business’ page is (via customers, friends, vendors, etc.) the more likely you are to show up in Facebook and be found by a potential customer. These pages are also getting indexed in Google and certainly help drive search engine traffic to Facebook, but based on a small sample, most businesses are getting no local search engine optimizaton help from these pages.

For example, this page for an Arizona adoption attorney may be helping promote this business, but there is a “nofollow” tag on the link to the business’ website, meaning no pagerank is being passed on.

Of course what’s the point of blogging about this unless I had a solution for you. So here goes:

How to Get Local Search Engine Optimization From Your Facebook Page

1. Set up a blog on your website.

2. Go to your Facebook page and click on “Edit Page”, then “More Applications” and browse for a RSS reader application like Simply RSS (thanks RobD). Add the app to your page using your blog’s feed url – Make sure your feed urls are on your domain, or if they are going through an RSS manager make sure that the RSS manager 301 redirects to your domain else the links will be redirected and not pass pagerank). Now your blog posts will show up on your Facebook page and the posts will not carry the “nofollow” tag. As long as the links are pointing to your domain (and not 302 redirecting via your RSS manager) you should be able to pass pagerank from this page to your site.

3. Post regularly with target keywords in the headlines so that you can get the SEO benefit from keyword rich anchor text.

4. Network your Facebook page up the wazoo. The more profile pages that link to your page the more likely your page is to get crawled and the stronger the page rank that will get passed on to your site.

For an example of this check out the blog links on this UK accountant’s Facebook page (and don’t forget to check out his friend Anna).

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75 Response Comments

  • Matt McGee  March 24, 2008 at 5:13 pm

    Very clever. Me likey.

  • Jeff Quipp  March 25, 2008 at 6:54 am

    Very interesting Andrew! Thanks for sharing 🙂

  • Gregorio  March 25, 2008 at 10:14 am

    It is a huge and great idea. I will think about that and try it. I will take care of what you suggest and I tell you later on

  • Andrew Shotland  March 25, 2008 at 10:18 am

    As Tim Gunn says Gregorio “Make it work. Make it work.”

  • Catfish SEO  March 25, 2008 at 11:13 am

    The only pitfall i can see with this is that I am not seeing any backlinks to your Facebook page from other profiles, so the page rank coming from your Facebook page to your blog is very low. I would love to see other profile links in the back link profile of this page, thus making the profile marketing suggestion much more valid. But so far I don’t see it. If you have any examples of pages like this that are showing profile backlinks, I would love to see them.

  • Catfish SEO  March 25, 2008 at 11:15 am

    Seems like you would have to network with people that had a small amount of friends and public profiles to make this work unless you target other business pages instead of personal profiles.

  • Andrew Shotland  March 25, 2008 at 11:31 am

    Catfish – you are correct that the localseoguide Facebook page is a pitiful example – I have not networked it and it’s pointing at Feedburner urls. But if you look at the links to the mentioned accountant’s website (link: goodadvice.tv) in Google you’ll see that their Facebook Page is the third link listed.

    Maybe I am misunderstanding your intent but wouldn’t you want to network with people who had large amounts of friends so that all of their public profile pages showed a link to your business’s Facebook Page?

  • D Legal  March 25, 2008 at 2:06 pm

    Great article Andrew! I’ve gone ahead and setup a page for my company LemonFree.com.

    If anyone is interested or would like to become a fan you can check it out here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/LemonFreecom/10026683569

    I’m going to push a couple of links into the page to get it spidered and indexed. Google is going to give a ton a weight to a link coming from such an authoritative site; especially one that has very few links pointing outside itself.

  • Andrew Shotland  March 25, 2008 at 2:21 pm

    Hate to turn your free lemons into real lemons D but your blog links are pointing at wordpress.com. This is not going to help you much.

  • MikeBradbury  March 25, 2008 at 8:08 pm

    Lets take it a step further.

    What if you could pay unwitting college students with strong profiles to put your RSS feed on their facebook?

    A hmmmm…..

  • Dev Basu  March 25, 2008 at 11:26 pm

    Genius tactic here Andrew! I only wish that there were more blog post sharing strategies rather than hot air in the seo sphere.

  • Ken Jones  March 26, 2008 at 4:26 am

    Absolute genius. I’m sure it won’t take long for this tactic to get used up and worn out, but for the time being it seems like a real winner

  • Jon Clark  March 26, 2008 at 10:17 am

    Great post!! Better question though…where can I get one of those T-shirts?? haha

  • SEO Ranter  March 26, 2008 at 10:33 am

    Haha, nice simple post – and yes, I did check out his friend Anna. I’m sure that’s rather more appealing material to have listed in ones friends than a mass of withered accountants, especially after this financial year!

  • Palmer Web Marketing  March 26, 2008 at 1:18 pm

    Good info. Didn’t even know that Facebook allowed a business profile.

  • David  March 26, 2008 at 4:32 pm

    You sure a feedburner feed doesn’t pass pagerank? It’s been bought out by Google, does a 301, and claims to have no detrimental affect on SEO? (Assuming it is detrimental, I will stop using it.)

  • Andrew Shotland  March 26, 2008 at 4:51 pm

    Holy crap David I think you are correct. I have revised the post to reflect this. Apologies to Feedburner.

  • SEO Consultant  March 27, 2008 at 7:22 am

    This is a great idea. I actually found Simply RSS by looking at other people’s facebook page.

    I wonder if it’s worthwhile to put anything on your blog directing people to your facebook page?

  • Daan Jansonius  March 27, 2008 at 8:04 am

    Great tip! Does this work for a RSS feed widget on personal pages too?

  • Andrew Shotland  March 27, 2008 at 8:35 am

    In theory it should but the /people/ pages I looked at with blogs are not displaying the blog posts.

  • Scott Salwolke  April 15, 2008 at 8:21 pm

    Interesting post. I’m still trying to figure out how Facebook helps companies other than for networking purposes. I look forward to reading other entries in your blog.

  • David  August 20, 2008 at 1:32 am

    The one thing I’m not understand is if we’re trying to link to the facebook page with keyword rich link or to your blog…Linking from an fb page would accomplish nothing thanks to the no-follow right?

    And getting an fb page ranked instead of your blog doesn’t seem like my favorite idea, although I spose if it brings in clients then its all worth it…

  • Andrew Shotland  August 21, 2008 at 8:21 am

    D,

    The idea here is that by adding a RSS feed to your Facebook Page you create outbound links without “nofollow” tags. If those links go back to your site, in theory you get a SEO benefit.

  • Eva White  August 28, 2008 at 9:20 am

    This is something new that I have read. I am definitely going to try it out. Thanks for sharing tips.

  • Fletch  December 2, 2008 at 8:33 am

    Maybe I missed something here but the lemonfree guy (reply #8) seems to have nofollow tags on his links?

  • Andrew Shotland  December 2, 2008 at 8:43 am

    Fletch, Senor LemonFree’s blog post links do not have nofollow tags on them.

  • Josh  February 26, 2009 at 1:33 pm

    Interesting. I just started up a facebook profile for our company and we are trying to build traffic through SEO. I will give it a try. I will definitely keep your blog as a reference for advice. thanks

  • Janaki  March 24, 2009 at 9:02 am

    Very interesting idea indeed! Incidentally I landed on this page while searching info related to facebook and business. I had done some basic stuff with my facebook page but I think I will try your idea shortly.

    Anyway thanks again for sharing!

  • Ulstrup  April 22, 2009 at 5:27 am

    Could not get Simply RSS to work, it’s not updated. So instead I use the Facebook application RSS Connect, which also works without nofollow.

  • קידום אתרים  May 10, 2009 at 2:36 am

    Nice post ! I used facebook for my buisness and it increased the amount of customers, no doubt it’s a good media to publish your products and services.

  • David  July 15, 2009 at 3:50 pm

    Very interesting read. Some questions for this topic now that it is months old. I’ve looked at the source of LemonFree and those links are FB.com addresses that apparently redirect and otherwise DO have “nofollow” attributes. Is this a change in FB since this post was written? Second, are any of you having results from RSS links into your site from FB as this post describes?
    ~Thanks

  • Facebook Fan Pages  October 5, 2009 at 6:16 am

    Interesting post ! I am using facebook fan pages for my business and visitors to my site are increasing through my fan page. Thanks for sharing such a nice piece of information.

  • Facebook Application Developer  November 19, 2009 at 3:32 am

    Nice post ! I used facebook for my buisness to keep update my users and customer about brand and services and it increased the amount of customers, no doubt it’s a good media to publish your products and services.

  • Brit  February 6, 2010 at 8:39 pm

    Hi

    My feed has just come up with the date 6 Jan 1970 on my business FB page Hawkshead Vineyard New Zealand! Can someone explain what I need to do in order to change the date of feeds!?

    Cheers

  • Shubham  February 9, 2010 at 9:00 am

    facebook drives my majority traffic…Some pretty cool tips.! Works great.!

  • Jan  March 2, 2010 at 4:56 pm

    I have tried everything…pulling in the blogs in your way and even now they have this Static FBML thing. All links are either no-followed or redirected. I checked the ones you have mentioned… that UK Accountant page is gone entirely. The one comment about Lemonfree has no viable links either…all nofollowed or redirected.

    I think Facebook has done their homework and made it completely impossible to get link juice now no matter what.

    If anyone has more suggestions, I’d sure like to hear them.

    Jan

  • Andrew Shotland  March 2, 2010 at 5:11 pm

    Sorry about that Jan. It was a good two year run with this tactic 🙂

  • Jan  March 2, 2010 at 6:24 pm

    I think I probably got about 6 months of it with their blog pull-in gadget. and I’m almost positive the Static FBML thing was dofollow when I first implemented it 3-4 months ago. They fight us every which way we turn. 🙂

    How do you feel about Google’s Buzz? I like it better than Twitter, but don’t really have the time to spend on those kinds of things much.

  • Organic Search Optimization  March 18, 2010 at 2:13 am

    I think I need help here. Why is that when I add the Simply RSS to my page it says “No Results” what might have been gone wrong here?

    Nievo Jan

  • Mike Campbell  April 12, 2010 at 4:54 pm

    Guessing this tactic is no longer working due to the implementation of FBML as said in earlier comments. They finally caught up huh… figures. 🙂

    However, we have found that facebook does drive quite a bit of traffic since we have started a “fan” page. The tough thing in our industry (water damage restoration) is getting friends.. I’ll be exploring your blog for more information and hopefully you’ll have a post about that.

    Thanks for a great post! Wish we could have gotten to it earlier 🙂

  • Martin  May 1, 2010 at 9:50 am

    No RSS apps available. Do you have a fix for this new development?

  • Peter  May 26, 2010 at 3:27 pm

    Great article. A living example of how Facebook can help a business online.

  • kathleen  June 7, 2010 at 6:23 am

    Its Nice article. Thanks for sharing such a nice piece of information.

  • Derek  July 26, 2010 at 12:36 am

    This is a very interesting post
    Thanks for posting!

  • Stock Value  August 5, 2010 at 9:15 pm

    This is an excellent post. Thanks for this information.
    ———————————–
    susan cripllar

  • Tom London  September 1, 2010 at 9:10 am

    Very helpful – will definitely try this one out soon…

  • venkata  September 22, 2010 at 9:45 pm

    awesome..

    practical piece of information

    will surely try it out..

  • Peter  September 24, 2010 at 9:38 am

    Localised doesn’t really apply in my industry but I am going to set up a facebook page anyway, purely to increase awareness and help bolster my site.

  • Todd  October 11, 2010 at 2:20 pm

    Hi Andrew, just wondering if you knew how to rectify a situation I have encountered with Facebook Pages. I have had my business page set up for a few months now, but now all of the sudden I cannot access the page in order to edit it, etc. I see my page as others would see it if visiting it, but I cannot gain admin access to it via my regular facebook profile page. Usually, I would be able to click on “Ads & Pages” from my home page and then access it, but now it say I no pages to admin. Any ideas? Ever heard of this happening before?

    Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

    Thanks,
    Todd

  • Andrew Shotland  October 11, 2010 at 2:32 pm

    Haven’t dealt with this issue Todd. Sorry.

  • Tez Art  October 26, 2010 at 8:36 am

    It’s crazy to think of how Facebook has grown from nothing to this huge, worldwide empire in a few years. I am an owner of a small business and I now use Facebook for my marketing, it keeps my clients updated on what we’re up to and really helps us to leave an impression of the brand.

    Thanks for the article.

    Annuity Rates

  • Jack Newbury  November 11, 2010 at 1:09 pm

    Facebook search is still in it’s infancy and we should expect to see big inroads from Facebook in the search arena as they figure out what to do with all that data they have. The very nature of Facebook will mean that a local search play from them could be very effective, especially since their foray into location services.

    Already we are seeing third party developers build out considerably powerful search tools such as http://www.facebooksearch.us that feature ways to search for photos across Facebook. In the not too distant future I see Facebook ramping up the search initiative and possibly rolling out some kind of browser toolbar with integrated search and social functions.

  • David Bryan  January 19, 2011 at 10:50 pm

    Really innovative idea.

  • Kathy Long  January 29, 2011 at 11:58 am

    Does this work the same with Networked Blogs?

    That link to the Accountant’s page just lands me on my own home page. Tried last night and again this morning. Anyone else having that problem?

    Great stuff, by the way! Thanks for sharing.

  • Alberto  February 13, 2011 at 9:44 am

    Thanks for sharing these tips. Im starting my facebook page for my business and looking ways to enrich it. I know im years behind but finally started.

  • Simon Oxford  March 16, 2011 at 12:15 pm

    Crafty move there Andrew, shame it sounds like it moght not be quite so straightforward with recent changes, but aside of facebook, your post has certainly given me a few other ideas..hehe! 😉 Really must begin experimenting with a little more RSS, very inspiring post there, cheers!

  • Andrew Shotland  March 16, 2011 at 12:30 pm

    Glad to be of service Simon. This technique is definitely out of date.

  • Orlando  April 1, 2011 at 11:48 am

    I agree! A Facebook Fan page can make a big impact on your local business. It did on mine.

  • Benjamin  April 8, 2011 at 12:48 am

    Hey Andrew,

    Does this only apply for facebook groups, or also for profiles? I have a business profile and use RSS Graffiti for RSS, but I can’t see a way to check if the ‘nofollow’ element is on or not. Could you tell me how?

    Thanks,
    Benjamin

  • Benjamin  April 8, 2011 at 12:49 am

    Actually I just turned on my SEO for Firefox plugin and it shows my blog posts as nofollows. What can I do?

  • robert williams  April 28, 2011 at 4:21 pm

    Hello, I have a page on facebook for my company. Can I control what content search engines list? It looks very messy when I now type in my company name to search engines due to all the facebook links coming in top rank (quite a few of them too). Is it possible to tell facebook not to list certain content or just to list root page and no further content?

  • robert williams  April 28, 2011 at 4:23 pm

    Orlando, can I please ask how google displays all of your company related content? How does your company domain rank next to your facebook content in a google search? Many thanks

  • Mike  May 16, 2011 at 7:44 pm

    Andrew,

    Thanks for this info as I need to do a better job of getting people to interact with my FBFP. I’m implementing your suggestions after posting this so I can start getting some Google love. It’s hard for the little guy to compete with the big boys in my niche…bad credit auto loans..so your advice is just what the Dr. ordered!!

  • Justin Vaira  May 24, 2011 at 10:51 am

    Anyone know how the new facebook group pages will affect seo for facebook groups?

  • John McCormick  October 10, 2011 at 10:00 pm

    We have had a facebook profile for our business for some time now with over 300 followers. I personally don’t know if people are using facebook for service businesses like our business. Maybe they are using it for reviews of products? What do you guys think?

  • Noticias de Angola  November 28, 2011 at 1:37 pm

    Nice article. But, can you tell me, if i can use a facebook backlink from a profile with good pagerank to help in my SEO estrategy?

  • jessica@lukeroxas  March 25, 2012 at 11:51 pm

    Interesting. I don’t have my own site yet, just a facebook page, but I’m planning on creating one, and hopefully by that time, I’ll try this one. 🙂

    Thanks! Cheers!

  • Ray  September 11, 2012 at 2:57 pm

    My blog is no follow now. How can I turn the dofollow on?

    • Andrew Shotland  September 11, 2012 at 3:03 pm

      If it’s on WordPress, just search for a “dofollow” plugin, else ask a software developer to help

  • emmake  September 12, 2012 at 8:15 am

    I do Germany Local SEO , really learn a lot from your site! very thanks!

  • Schwanson  November 10, 2012 at 8:15 pm

    Does this still work? If so, can someone explain how to 301 the no follow rss link?

    • Andrew Shotland  November 10, 2012 at 8:23 pm

      I think this Facebook SEO technique is a bit out of date.