You have may heard that Facebook has opened itself to advertising and marketing over the past month through several initiatives, one of them being the feature of creating pages for businesses (Microsoft) and/or personalities (Kevin Rose). If you’ve felt tempted to create a page for your own blog, that may have merits on its own as a means to create a community of fans *on* Facebook. But if you did it expressly for link credit, because Facebook pages are visible to Google, you may want to hold your horses, ‘pardner.
The reason is simple. Facebook pages, first of all, only show the summary information for a page, such as the name of the site, and some background information of the site. It also includes a full URL, of which you can’t change the anchor text (it remains your URL name), which is tempting to think that — “Hey, Facebook, a Pagerank 8 site, is now linking to my humble blog!”
Well, that may be, but if you look extra close, its a link that uses the (dreaded) “rel=nofollow” qualifier. Which means that although Google *does* see the site, and does see the link, its not going to “credit” your site with all of that linky-goodness.
… which really is entirely consistent with its recent theme of trying to maintain “real” or “authentic” or “organic” link patterns (and its subsequent penalization of sites which are selling links, such as this site).
So, there might be other reasons why setting up a page for your blog on Facebook is something you might do, but don’t do it for the links, as its not something Google will recognize in earnest anyway.
