I’ve been doing a bit of work into social media recently and decided to do a bit of research on whether there is a way to get direct text links from Facebook that pass on SEO benefit.

I created a Facebook Page for Soup - (the agency I work with) and decided that before I push the page for fans etc I will use it as a test site to see if I can get SEO benefit out of it.

I install an application for a client called Simply RSS and noticed on the client’s Facebook Page that the links back to their site were not being nofollowed. This gave me the idea to see if it passes SEO benefit.

I add my RSS feed from No Pork Pies on the Soup facebook page and linked to it on this site to try to get it indexed.

On the 9th December Google indexed the Facebook Page.

Now when I look at site links in Yahoo it displays the link from Facebook

When looking in Google’s Webmaster tools I see several links from the Facebook Page to my site.

Sometimes links that have nofollow on them are shown on Yahoo and Google so this still isn’t conclusive, but is looking pretty promising.

The Facebook Page has no PageRank but when the page is promoted it will begin to gain equity that can then be passed on to the relevant site.

My client wanted a Facebook Page because they couldn’t create a ‘media hub’ within their own site. My problem was that Facebook would gain all the link benefit from this and the client would lose out on potential equity.

The results of this test show that the Facebook Page can now be built and some SEO benefit can be passed to the client site.

NEXT STEP

As a next step in the test I have changed the Facebook Page to indentify that it is a test page and hope Google re-indexes it because of the change.

I have created a customised XML feed with an orphaned page and jibberish as the link. Once the Facebook page gets re-indexed I can look at whether the orphaned page is also indexed. If it is, I know Google is following the link, if it ranks for the jibberish term then I know that Google is passing link equity from Facebook.

I’ll update this post once Google has re-indexed the Facebook Page.