Facebook Opening Up To Google’s Crawler: Bad For Facebook? Good For SEO?

One of the reasons that I love Facebook and that I hardly use Myspace is because of the “legitimacy” and “truthfulness” of everyone’s profiles compared to Myspace. When I browse one of my friend’s profiles on Facebook I always find what I’m looking for quickly and I know that it is more or less accurate. It worries me that Facebook is slowly turning into another Myspace and opening it up to Google’s crawlers might invite many unwelcome changes. What I don’t like with Myspace is that a majority of the activity in my profile constituted of annoying people trying to cheaply pawn their mediocre products, services, parties, bands, or what ever on everyone… I became inundated with messages by people who seek to annoyed the majority around them with their self serving message. I draw a parallel between these type of Myspacers and pyramid marketers or religious zealots who try everything to push their products, services, or ideas onto you. Myspace has really lost a lot of credibility with me. Within the first week that I started using it I had about 30 friend requests, of which only 3 were actually legit requests from people I actually knew. It was enough for me to stop using Myspace, and I hope that Facebook will not become the same. I am Already very annoyed by some of the new applications that have been created and send out invites to friends of the person adding the application to their profile. What I find even more irritating is that some of my so called Facebook “friends” actually think I would even slightly be interested in an application called “Vampire”, “Superwall”, or “Free Gifts”. What people don’t realize is the more that they blanket the digital social landscape with their plugs, the less effective these plugs become. We are now at the point where the ‘interuption marketing’ causes such a minute impact that it only serves to irritate those around you. For those people wanting to learn more about how to successfully market your products, services, and other junk you think I’m interested in, I suggest you pickup Premission Marketing by Seth Godin and learn how to get my permission to market to me.

Now there is some positive in the fact that Facebook will be indexed by the various search engines other than making it easier to browse and find information you are looking for (A.K.A. Facestalking or Facecreeping as some of my friends like to call it). By indexing Facebook it will be possible to increase the clout that your SEO efforts on Facebook have in impacting your keyword rankings and pagerank. This of course is a great thing for web entrepreneurs, and will lead to increased profits, but as stated above it will ‘I believe’ lead to the degradation of Facebooks legitimacy.