Facebook Wants to be Your Home Page

It seems that there is a lot of focus on Facebook’s recent advances with their announcement of their open graph and a lot of talk within the SEO industry has been going on in regard to how this will affect SEO as we know it.

SEOMoz did a White Board Friday video (below) explaining the main differences between the two. If you haven’t seen it already I suggest you do as it makes things clearer.

I can understand why people were reacting as if this is the end of SEO – I even thought it but not in the way others have.

For the immediate future Google should be scared of Facebook (they’ve publicly admitted it) Why? One word – Traffic. Google over the last year has started to lose significant amounts of traffic to Facebook. And this is worrying for them.

Another threat? More and more advertisers will promote on Facebook – sometimes instead of advertising on Google.  Stands to reason hey? Crazy number of users, highly target-able and so cheap compared to Adwords (at the moment).

Are they threatened for search? Not at the moment. People just don’t tend to use Facebook as a search engine yet. If they do – it’s heavily reliant on things being made popular.

Google wins in the search war – but they cannot rest on that. Once Facebook becomes a habit for people to use as a search engine (and if they get good results) this could prove a massive blow for Google’s market share.

Another major threat is Bing. Yep – Microsoft have invested in Facebook, and are likely to always get special treatment when it comes to accessing data that could help them deliver better results from their search engine. If Bing were to be able to utilise the data from Facebook’s open graph (Like buttons etc) then this could really turn up the heat on Google.

I noticed a very interesting step towards how Facebook are trying to become embedded more in users minds tonight. I saw they introduced this:

That’s right – they are encouraging you to make Facebook your homepage. A big move in trying to get more and more people onto it before Google (this tends to be most people’s homepage).

A very interesting move by Facebook, and something which is bound to increase their usage, traffic and ad revenue over time. As mentioned earlier here is the traffic gain Facebook has seen recently (courtesy of Hitwise.)

As you can see – massive growth – complete with overlap the end.

This advancement in sharing on the internet will affect SEO – at least from a link building and traffic point of view. You need to make your content popular, so the more people that like content, the more people will link to it, the more mentions it will get online and the more “likes” it will get via Facebook and shared via the newsfeed.

The fact of the matter is – to me – link building should be based more on good quality content that people want to link to naturally, so with the addition of sharing via Facebook – this is not only more important but its more powerful.

I tweeted this earlier today:

I think it’s getting even more important to produce high quality content in written, audio and video. You have to do it and you should by default – not just because it helps in your search engine positioning.

As promised, here is the video from SEOMoz.

Guys – what do you think? Facebook V Google – any winner?

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