Facebook Plugins – Open Graph

Last week saw the web-wide launch of the Facebook ‘like’ button result in more than 50,000 websites integrating Facebook’s new social plugins in just one week – presumably enticed by the 425+ million Facebook users engaging with the ‘like’ button daily.

The new Facebook plugins are a core component of the Open Graph platform that enables sites and apps to share information about users enabling them to customise our web browsing experience.

On top of a more personalised experience for the user, the Facebook ‘like’ button is a form of social linking, meaning that websites who include ‘like’ buttons on their pages can benefit from traffic being driven to their site from Facebook with every ‘like’.

If the Facebook ‘like’ button takes off this could mean some big changes for Google and SEO as Google’s algorithm uses links to a website to help determine where the site will rank in search results, so if these links are replaced with Facebook’s ‘social links’ (likes) which Google and other search engines won’t have full access to Facebook will become the best positioned company to rank the web.

Up to now Google has been the primary focus for SEO with a 91.2% search engine market share in the UK for April 2010, but with Facebook’s Open Graph taking a more dominant link-focused role within the web and judging on the 50,000 websites that have already added the new Facebook plugins, it’s going to be all too easy for Facebook to start organising the web.

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