Facebook Spamming Your Identity To Drive Their Traffic

May 18, 2007
Filed Under Customer Experience, Reputation Management |

The other day I was highly surprised to learn that my Facebook profile was showing up in the top 10 for Google when you Google my name. In my opinion, turning on a feature like this without informing your users of the change to drive traffic using users’ identity to their social network via search engines is rather sleazy. After looking through their 89 zillion privacy options, I could not find a way to do it without excluding current community users which I did not want to do. This was their response to my question on how to do want I wanted.

Hi David,

I’m afraid there is currently no way to prevent your Facebook
account from appearing in a Google search. However, please
keep in mind that only users that are currently able to view
your profile will be able to view your listing in a Google search.
If you have any further questions, please feel free to let me
know.

Thanks for contacting Facebook

Let’s ignore the factual inaccuracies of that statement and just say that Facebook clearly doesn’t get it here. Or purposely chooses not to. I do want everyone who sees Facebook as a valuable tool and who has signed up to be able to search on me and find me. What I don’t want is for people outside this community, who often have misperceptions about these communities to see it when they do a search on me in Google or another search engine. What I don’t get is why it’s not already possible within the confines of the 89 zillion privacy options Facebook already has:

So Facebook, please give this user (and the thousands of others like me) what they want. Immediately add a noindex option for my profile so that community users can fully see and search my profile when inside the community while not allowing outside search engines to index it. I look forward to your prompt action and resolution of this request. Thanks.

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Comments

8 Responses to “Facebook Spamming Your Identity To Drive Their Traffic”

knox on May 21st, 2007 6:21 am

You should Digg it, when you wanne have a emmidiate reaction.
Pete Cashmore on May 21st, 2007 10:37 am

Actually, it’s not all that bad - it’s been like this at least 6 months, and Google only indexes Facebook pages that are linked to from elsewhere (most commonly, when you post a Facebook badge somewhere like a blog). When not logged in to Facebook, nobody can view that page, and those that are logged in only see a photo and location.

I agree that they should have a tick box to keep you out of Google results, since a lot of people don’t realize their profiles can be indexed by linking to them.
Technology Evangelist on May 26th, 2007 11:41 pm

Facebook Opening Up Profiles to Search Engines…

David Dalka raised an interesting point about Facebook’s apparent policy change to open up public profiles for search engine indexing: Facebook Spamming Your Identity To Drive Their Traffic The other day I was highly surprised to learn that my Faceboo…
michaelzimmer.org » Archives » Facebook Allowing Profiles to be Crawled by Google on May 29th, 2007 9:08 pm

[…] Looks like David Dalka originally discovered this a few weeks ago, and demanded a “noindex option for my profile so […]
Yusuf on June 5th, 2007 1:07 pm

Same is true for LinkedIn profiles
Law.com: Myspace and Facebook Privacy Limits Testedin Emotional Distress Suit on June 15th, 2007 10:12 am

[…] to not index your main profile in search engines and I still have not received a professional response regarding any plans to rectify this serious issue which many users would not even know is an […]
Facebook Spamming Your Identity in Search Results to Drive Their Traffic - Part 2 on September 5th, 2007 10:20 am

[…] I wrote about this issue back on May 18th when I removed my public listing. This is not a new feature today as is incorrectly being reported. It is Facebook announcing something that they should have announced back in May when I noticed them doing this. Some bloggers seem to have gotten this part totally wrong. […]
Postcards from the Edgy » Blog Archive » Goodbye to all that on December 2nd, 2007 3:46 pm

[…] Ajax and by news of Facebook users’ spamming of all and sundry courtesy of Facebook’s borrowing of their gmail contact […]