I noted today that facebook profiles are now out in the wild and started pondering the impacts of this from an SERPS perspective. While it may not initialy seem like such a big deal it only about 20m or so which in the scale of things is not that massive.

However, I think its pretty obvious that facebook is an authority site so these pages will get a significant boost, the SEO world has been in full swing on facebook for some time and you can buy a facebook friend network of 5000 for a couple hundred dollars.

As of writing this google is only showing 53,000 pages for Facebook and a SEODigger report only shows then in no.1 spot for a 142 SERPS (obviously seodigger is not the most reliable tool due to the limited serps). I am interested to see what they will show in a month after the profiles have been public. I will try to remember and do a comparison in a month.

The vast majority of the 53,000 pages listed are personal profiles, this is going into direct competition with sites like linkedin and ecademy which pride themselves on getting you listed for your name. As these facilities expand over the coming weeks I am sure that SEO's will already be up and running. I really do think that this is a competitor that most people dont even realise they have yet at least in terms of serps.

Serps position gives rise to opportunity and I have a feeling ;-) that there is a world of SEO's waiting to pounce on this new serp shift. Anyway maybe I am completely wrong and it will not have a big impact but when we see the bias that Google has towards wikipedia (even though its a pile of crap, come on Matt Cutts sort it out) I cant but think that this bias will carry over to facebook and we are about to see another big swing in serps.

For fun I am going to pick on a friend of mine who is a business Social networking expert Rory Murray, I am not hyperlinking from his name so I dont bias the results (not).  At the moment his facebook profile is not in the top 50 SERPS for his name how long before its first page?   If you dont think that being found for your own name is a big thing in SERPS, ask Googles own Vanessa Fox.