How Will Facebook’s ‘Like’ Button Affect Your Search Engine Rankings?
By Anna Johnson on May 12th, 2010Whilst including Facebook’s recently released ‘Like’ button on your website may boost your business in a number of ways it’s unlikely to have any direct search engine optimization (SEO) benefits.
Because the Like button is based on Facebook’s proprietary code and NOT on HTML – which is readable by Google, Bing and the other search engines – the search engines won’t recognize nor index any links, information or connections created through displaying the Facebook Like button.
Consequently, there’s no reason to believe that linking to or from a Like button will pass Google PageRank or any other measure of authority or reputation that could enhance your search engine rankings.
But does it matter?
If the Like button ultimately increases traffic and conversions… who cares about its failure to affect SEO (unless there are negative implications)? And, in any case, including the Like button may still have indirect SEO (and therefore search traffic) benefits.
Such benefits may arise from the Like button attracting greater attention to a given webpage, which in turn encourages people to link back to the page with good, old-fashioned text links which ARE counted by the search engines for SEO purposes.
