Search Engine Land’s Most Shared Stories on Facebook of 2012

Today for our last installment top stories from the past year, we feature the most-shared stories on Facebook. Our little Panda friend made it in the headline nine times (“Nine times? Nine times.”– Quick, name the movie!)*

Meanwhile, Google stories are  popular with our Facebook crowd, appearing in seventeen out of the top 20 headlines, same as the top shared stories on Google+.

As with our other top social stories of 2012, this list was generated by Social Crawlytics, a social analytics tool that crawls and provides social activity for each URL on a website. The tool only tracks Facebook shares, so this list doesn’t include Facebook likes or comments posted.  Our Facebook plugin is configured to show “Shares”, “Likes” and “Comments,” so the the displayed number you see on an article is different than you see here.

1. Google Confirms Panda 3.3 Update, Plus Changes To How It Evaluates Links, Local Search Rankings & Much More (512)

2. Google Pushing Out Panda Update 3.9 Tonight (347)

3. Google’s Gags Go Worldwide For April Fool’s Day 2012 (313)

4. Google Releases Panda Update 21, Impacts 1.1% Of US Queries In English (307)

5. For Social Media Marketers, SEO Is Much More Popular Than PPC (306)

6. Facebook Gets Into Local Search With “Facebook Nearby” For iOS & Android (270)

7. Official: It’s Google Panda Update 23, Impacting ~1.3% Of Queries (249)

8. Google Launches Knowledge Graph To Provide Answers, Not Just Links (240)

9. Google Says Panda 3.4 Is ‘Rolling Out Now’ (239)

10. Back To The Future: Google Announces A Meta Keywords Tag Just For News Articles (185)

11. Google Panda 3.2 Update Confirmed (180)

12. Ex-Googler: “To Please Google With Your SEO, Forget About SEO” (176)

13. Google Panda Update 20 Released, 2.4% Of English Queries Impacted (175)

14. 2012 Year In Review: Important Shifts In Google SEO (164)

15. This Year, NORAD Tracks Santa With Microsoft & Bing, Not Google (160)

16. Panda Update 3.92 Rolling Out (Or Is It Panda 20 Time?) (148)

17. Official Google Panda Update Version 3.8 On June 25th (143)

18. Study: 39% Of Google Search Referrers Now “Not Provided” (131)

19. Google Maps Is Back On The iPhone: Native iOS App Released (131)

20. Confirmed: Google Panda Refresh #22 On November 21st; 0.8% Of Queries Impacted (129)

*You really need the answer, don’t you? It’s Ferris Beuller’s Day Off.