This is not unlike similar buttons on social
bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit and Stumbleupon.
The difference is that with FB the page is shared with a
community of friends rather than to a bank of anonymous
users.
The sheer volume of FB users - currently
over 400-million – potentially creates a domino effect
that could drive huge volumes of traffic to individual sites.
The potential is so huge that even Google
is sounding alarm bells.
As Google rose to become the barometer of
all that's worthy on the Web, publishers rushed to change
their sites to appease the Google god.
"Search Engine Optimization" became a massive
industry; a multitude of SEO consultants sprung up, offering
to tweak your Web site to better fit Google's measure of
the Web.
Facebook announced Likes as a form of "social
links" and that's really bad news for Google, since
its algorithm uses links between sites to determine their
order in search results.
Facebook seeks to replace this open system
of links between pages with the "social links"
(or Likes) that it controls.
Google and other search engines won't have
full access to all these Likes, so the company best positioned
to rank the Web will be Facebook.
Of course there will be the usual concerns
about privacy, as with all things FB does, but if it’s
privacy that you want, then don’t create a FB profile.
Already appearing
on Google’s first page seems a bit like owning
a ‘Best of Tom Jones’ CD to me, and their
‘white hat’ and ‘black hat’
optimisation rules has already become ‘old hat’
in my mind. |
|
I like the ‘like button.’
Kader Khan
