Is Google Indexing Facebook Profiles? Options

[kulpreet_singh]

I was searching for my own name on Google, and found my Facebook profile at the bottom of the list.

http://www.google.ca/search?q=kulpreet+singh

Something new? I thought Facebook profiles were private... and are not indexed.. so how can they be ranked?

This post has been edited by kulpreet_singh: Jul 25 2007, 09:53 PM

[Jozian]

Hmmm. I found you right where you said - Facebook profile in the SERP.

Couldnt view it without logging in though... I guess that makes it *sorta* private

Another example of non-free content being indexed by the big G.

Good or bad, it's happening. I wonder if this is Facebook trying to increase hits or Google extending it's reach?

-Jeff

[kulpreet_singh]

Rather than Google indexing my profile because of its content (which should still be private), I think this is a case of linking. I linked to my profile from my homepage, so maybe that caused my profile to be well ranked, because there is not a lot of competition for my name. Just a wild guess.

[Adrian]

I think this is a case of linking.

Quite possibly, it's not a full listing, but it knows about the page from your link. Doesn't look like it the page has actually been crawled, there's no cache.

[JohnMu]

The robots.txt disallows it, so it might be something temporary ...

User-agent: *
Disallow: /profile.php
Disallow: /album.php
Disallow: /photo.php
Disallow: /p.php
Disallow: /feeds/

The page itself does a 302 redirect:

Results of the http://oyoy.eu/ server-headers test
Tested at 26.07.2007 10:21:57 / from 10.10.10.55:

URL=http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=580719461
Result code: 302 (Found / Found)
New location: http://www.facebook.com/login.php

URL=http://www.facebook.com/login.php
Result code: 200 (OK / OK)

Which would mean that Google + the others would be right in adding it to the index. The login page only has:

<meta name="robots" content="noodp" />

which allows the login page to get indexed (albeit without the ODP description).

I imagine it will drop out soon enough, though I could see that it might be a neat idea to have it indexed (or at least to allow the users to decide if they wanted it indexed).

John

[EGOL]

This is an example of why we should never consider anything on a web server to be private. If a person on the right server does not have an index file in a folder then the entire directory structure of the website can become available for indexing, public view and duplicate content. This could be blocked in various ways but if we do not have intimate access to the server we can't tell what is in place.

This post has been edited by EGOL: Jul 26 2007, 05:32 AM

[rustybrick]

If you are linking to your Facebook profile, Google will include it in their index.

Google just sees the link, it cannot access the page. The link isn't blocked, just the page is blocked.

[JohnMu]

Shouldn't the robots.txt prevent an empty listing in the results? Does anyone know what it was like earlier?

Looking at
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:facebo...00&filter=0

it shows quite a lot of profiles indexed ("Results 1 - 100 of about 4,230"), but they're all without snippet or title.

Strangely, there are a few special cases in between:

- some have a "Translate this page" link: this would only be possible if Google were able to read the contents of the page and could recognize that it was not in english. That's really, really strange, in my opinion. Perhaps Google was able to crawl the pages but is kept from keeping cache, snippet or title in the results? Hmmmmmm.

- one or more listings have title, snippet and cache, eg:

Facebook - Barack Obama
Barack Obama's profile page provides information about the presidential candidate along with photos, events, posted items, wall posts and links to ...
www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=500055852

Why? The page is behind the login page just like the others.

- one or more has the login page indexed:

Facebook | Login
File Format: Unrecognized - View as HTML
facebook. Login. You must log in first. Enter your email address and password. Email: Password:. Need an account? Register from your computer at ...
m.facebook.com/profile.php?id=839925071

- some others from http://www.google.com/search?q=site:facebo...00&filter=0 or http://www.google.com/search?q=site:facebo...00&filter=0 or http://www.google.com/search?q=site:facebo...00&filter=0 (you can also see how they expand "andy" to include "andrew"), etc.

my facebook profile
www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=709766886

Almost all with a title but no snippet / cache. Could it be that the title is the anchor text that was used? Hmm

John

This post has been edited by JohnMu: Jul 26 2007, 07:19 AM

[tamar]

Here's a very pertinent blog post.

You need to uncheck this option in your Facebook Privacy Settings:

Allow my public listing to be indexed by external search engines

[Ruud]

What ends up in Google is your public profile. The friendly URL of that is /p/Your_Name/yourID.

What shows up here, and who sees what, can be controlled from the Search link under your Privacy.

[kulpreet_singh]

Aha! That's what it is. Although I did know about my privacy settings, I'm not entirely sure every other Facebook user knows... and they could be exposing their photos or other information. Tamar, do you know if the "Allow my public listing to be indexed by external search engines" option is selected by default?

I wonder if.. someone, in order to use the Facebook domain strength, could sign up some bogus account as a username with specific keywords, and link to it in order to get ranking for that keyword? Or, alternately, if someone could optimize their public Facebook profile enough to rank for that keyword?

People do certainly rank for their LinkedIn profile.

This post has been edited by kulpreet_singh: Jul 26 2007, 12:45 PM

[JohnMu]

Nobody would try to take advantage of any loopholes, Kulpreet

I think there are people placing links wherever they can, most of those who do it can't even judge if it's really helping them. I guess that's their problem though

Any guesses why Barack Obama's profile is fully indexed but not accessable? That one doesn't make much sense to me...

John