Facebook Open Graph was recently launched during the F8 Developer Conference.
Let me quote a few lines from CNet.
The bigger announcement was what Facebook calls the “Open Graph,” and how Facebook plans to connect disparate corners of the Web that other social sites are building. “Yelp is mapping out the part of the graph that relates to small businesses. Pandora is mapping out the part of the graph that relates to music,” Zuckerberg said. “If we can take these separate maps of the graph and pull them all together, then we can create a Web that’s smarter, more social, more personalized, and more semantically aware.”
“These connections aren’t just happening on Facebook, they’re happening all over the Web, and today with the Open Graph we’re bringing all these things together,” Zuckerberg said.
With these bold announcement from the Facebook CEO himself, some questions keep bugging some people on issues involving web search engines such as Google. Will the FACEBOOK OPEN GRAPH can finally topple the dominant Google? What future will it lead SEO practitioners if such thing happens?
I would say Google will still be the dominant force in the World Wide Web. The Google Link Graph technology has a different approach than that of the Facebook Like Graph. The crawling of pages and link graph architecture of tagging, indexing and ranking pages according to relevancy will still hold useful to different type of searchers online. So far, Google is outstanding. No doubt about it.
As for the Facebook Open Graph – with that dub of “like button” that can added in your website and being evangelized by the Facebook CEO himself as the wave of future in search, it still needs to be proven.
I am a little skeptical if it will change the search behavior patterns in the next few years although we have already seen the impact of social networks and personalized search results. Certain lines were drawn but not entirely when it comes to the dominance of web search engine results are concerned. The fact that some results “can be liked” by some can be “not-so-likeable” for others.
Moreover, we have already seen such “liking”, “favoriting” , “digging” and “bookmarking” from among the best and largest social networks such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, etc. and still the ground net effect of such social behavior remains to be the fact that Google is still Google. It is still getting larger and larger.In fact, Google has already added into their algorithm some” social media flavors” which we have been witnessing these days on integrating Twitter, Google Buzz and many more. We need to take note too that the social tagging and bookmarking is one of the strongest signals known to many. You can read more on the how Google uses the Social Media to impact search results here.
Thus, SEO practitioners need not worry that Facebook Open Graph can kill Google and SEO practice. However; SEO practitioners should always be well-prepared taking on Social Media Optimization (which I discussed Google Caffeine back then) in order to have well-rounded craft arsenal on our belt.