Are Facebook Likes Replacing Links as the New Web Currency?

Last week at the F8 Developers conference, Facebook announced their new Open Graph protocol which allows websites to utilize Facebook’s APIs to create social experiences with their content. There are a ton of cool things they launched, including the “like” button, which I’m sure you’ve seen popping up all over the place now. It was so quick and easy I even added it to my site.

But, this is the first peek into a problem SEO experts have been foreshadowing for a few years now - how Google is going to adapt to the changing social landscape. Google is built on the assumption that inbound links are the currency of the web. Every web page has it’s own authority (PageRank), and can pass that authority to other websites through the use of links. What happens when this assumption is thrown out the window?

That’s essentially what Facebook has done with its new platform. If liking a page replaces linking to a page, then how will Google find the most relevant content?

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  1. erincolbert posted this