You want a completely free link to your own website? Every link to your website improves your rankings in search engines and here is an easy 10-step-guide on how you get one from Facebook.
Most people have a profile on facebook, which can be accessed by their friends. But what most people don’t know is that they also have a public profile page containing a limited set of data. This public page is also accessible to all search engines, so through a big index of links on facebook, they crawl your page too eventually.
This guide shows you how to make sure you share your website on your public facebook page.
1. First, log in to facebook and find your own name in upper left corner on facebook.com
2. Check what URL your name links to and copy this link (you can right-click the link and copy it). My public facebook profile has this URL: www.facebook.com/soerenholm
3. Log out of facebook and go the link you just copied – this is your public profile (if you don’t log out you won’t see this page as the search engines does). Now you can see if your website is actually present on this page and what website is presented. If your website appears here, you can just skip this post and maybe read another post about linking from your LinkedIn profile.
4. Ok – you didn’t skip this post, so here is how you get free link juice from Facebook.
First of all let’s make sure you have entered a website to your profile.
Login to facebook and go to the homepage from which you can edit your profile (sorry about the screenshots in danish!):
5. Click the link to edit your contact details:
6. Now enter your website’s URL into the website field. Remember that you can promote anything here; your webshop, your blog or maybe even your Twitter account which also appears in the search engines’ result pages.
7. Hold on! You’re almost done. Now we just need to make sure the link to your website appears on your facebook profile. In the upper right corner you’ll find a link to your privacy settings in the drop down menu:
8. Here you can configure what data you want to share with whom. Find the link you see on this screenshot:
9. Make sure your website is shown to everybody/all. This means your link appears on your public profile.
10. Now check to see if your website is on your public facebook profile.
It is? You’re done and you now have a completely free link pointing at your own website.
august 18th, 2010 d. 00:07
The resulting link appears to be nofollow though?
august 18th, 2010 d. 03:23
Hi Bo and thanks for your reply!
I don’t see the nofollow on this link – before I wrote the post I checked both in the -tag and in the meta tag robots to make sure it was a do-follow link.
Am I missing something here? (Please let me know if I do
august 18th, 2010 d. 03:35
A friend just double-checked, it appears there is rel=nofollow when i am logged in to facebook, and view the facebook.com/soerenholm page.
But when I am logged out(which I assume is how googlebot would view the page), then there is no nofollow.
Interesting, I will try it thanks, can’t hurt
august 18th, 2010 d. 10:03
Yes you are right about the nofollow when you are logged in … Strange.
I don’t know why Facebook made it that way. To me it seems like they forgot to nofollow the link on the public profiles which is the important one in terms SEO because they are the pages that Google crawl and index.
So let’s exploit this glitch while we can