Are You Helping Facebook Outrank You For Your Brand Name?

Facebook allows you to embed fan pages on your own site, which might result in Facebook outranking you for your own brand name. For example, the Search Engine Land fan page has a link for me to “add a fan box to your site.” If you look at the code of that widget, you might notice Facebook is using your brand name as the anchor text to the Facebook URL. Since the URL is search engine friendly and since Facebook has a lot of link popularity and trust, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some Facebook pages outranking the official brand web site, due to this new gadget code.

Here is a screen capture of the code:

I want you to notice this part of the code:

<a href=”https://www.facebook.com/searchengineland”>Search Engine Land</a> on Facebook

As you can see, that is rich anchor text pointing to Facebook. Potentially, Facebook can outrank this site for our own name. So, if you are concerned about that, beware on how you use this gadget and where you use it. Of course, you can always slap on the nofollow attribute to the link, so Google won’t pass along any juice to that page.

Hat tip to Sam from OhNuts for sending this my way.