Google Real Time Search Now Shows Updates From Facebook Fan Pages

Google’s Real Time Search has gained a new data source, updates from Facebook fan pages. Google had announced a deal to list this information back in December, and now it’s finally being implemented. Google has tweeted the news.

See our detailed guide, Google Launches Real Time Search Results to understand how Google Real Time Search works, where it appears and how to use it. Facebook fan page updates now appear within those results, which include all of these sources:

• Twitter tweets
• Google News links
• Google Blog Search links
• Newly created web pages
• Freshly updated web pages
• FriendFeed updates
• Jaiku updates
• Identi.ca updates
• TwitArmy updates
• Google Buzz posts
• MySpace updates
• Facebook fan page updates

All but the last three were part of Google Real Time Search when it launched in December. MySpace material was added this month. So were Google Buzz posts. Our How To Search Google Buzz post provides detailed instructions on how to search on Google Real Time Search for just Buzz or Twitter information.

With Facebook, it’s important to note that it is only Facebook fan page updates that are included. Things that are shared on fan pages by fan page owners — such as links, status updates, photos and vidoes — can now be found in Google Real Time Search. However, comments made by non-owners on fan pages will not be included. Nor will updates that are made on personal pages. Our Google & Bing’s Unequal Facebook Status Update Deals article explains more about this. And while Bing is getting more data than Google, as covered in that article, it has yet to make any of it findable.

Want to see some of the Facebook content. Try this link. That configures Google Real Time Search to show only updates from Facebook, as you’ll see here:

From that link, you can add more words to narrow your search to particular topics that appear in Facebook fan page updates. For example, here’s a search for updates about the Olympics that come from Facebook fan pages:

You can see that the first update is from the Global Laugher Network fan page, as I’ve pointed at below:

This is also a good time for search marketers and marketers in general to think again about Facebook, if you haven’t already. More and more Facebook content has been made visible to search engines over the years. Also in that time, fan pages were added but still aren’t used by some. Google’s move makes having Facebook fan pages even more essential. Without one, you’re missing out on a chance to be found within yet another area, Google’s real time results.

And hey, speaking of fan pages, a reminder. You can follow Search Engine Land on its own Facebook fan page. I also maintain my own page here.

Postscript (4:45pm PT): I’ve been watching Google Real Time Search results closely since the launch. So far, I don’t see any Facebook fan page updates making it into Google’s real time box in its regular results. I’m sure they’ll come, however. They do show when you drill-down into real time results.
For example, consider this search for public schools:

After monitoring for a good 10 minutes, no Facebook updates appeared in the real time box. But if you click on the link above the box, the full results did have a Facebook update:

As I said, I’m sure Facebook visibility will improve as the launch matures. Ironically, despite us having posted this article to our our Facebook Fan Page:


You still can’t find that update in Google Real Time Search:

PPC Marketing vs Facebook Advertising

Google is the Bad Egg of Internet Marketing & M-L-M. With so many accounts slapped and closed down for good, Top Gurus are turning to Facebook Advertising as a far superior option for cheap targeted traffíc.

Don't Put your Eggs in One Marketing Basket

Savvy Pro marketers like our members aren't panicking - we've always had a back up plan on the go. Our advice has been simple - don't put all your eggs in one basket - especially Google's! If you're using Pay Per Click Advertising, then make sure you also have some SEO going on - to generate organic traffic.

It takes a lot of hard work to get your site ranked through organic traffic - writing articles, forum posts, blogs, squidoo lenses, hub pages, video marketing - to build up your online presence and expertise for your chosen niche keywords.

Organic takes time. So if you don't have the patience and want to generate lots of traffic fast, PPC is a good to have as part of your marketing model.

But internet marketers and PPC experts are absolutely fed up with the arrogance of Google. So if we're not doing Google Adwords for our marketing, where do we get the masses of traffic we are still able to generate on a daily basis?

Adding Content Rich Social Marketing into the Mix

If you want free traffic, you usually have to spend masses of your time with manually writing copy and creating podcasts and video marketing. So really it's not free at all - time is money and all that. Hiring a copy writing group to create niche content can become quite expensive.

So all this organic SEO friendly traffic takes time to build up and requires consistent daily effort. This is good to add to your marketing mix but won't give you fast traffic.

What's super important too is that organic SEO content is ultimately still controlled by the search engines, so Google still has power over how you get seen by your prospects.

How hard is it these days to do enough clever keyword research to get your unique niche and rank on page one of Google. Almost impossible - especially if you're one newbie trying to compete with the big gurus in internet marketing or M-L-M network marketing arena.

What Marketing Strategies to Use that Beat Google Adwords Fair and Square?

What company is fair and sane, loves affiliates and direct marketers? What company attracts nearly 40 billion views a month and the traffic is uber quality and dirt cheap? Who is this company? Well, it's your friendly neighbourhood.... Facebook!

Facebook is the only company that Google actually acknowledges is a real competitor to them. Facebook is currently showing up as having four hundred million active members - that makes it 5 times the size of Google!!!

Yet Facebook ads represent just 5% of the advertising done on Google.

Now don't be thinking Facebook is just for youngsters! Insidefacebook.com published its statistics and show that only 11% of users are aged 13-17. While 33% are 18-25s, a whopping 18% are aged between 35 and 44. That's 100 million people! And a further 9% are aged 45-54 and 4% 55-65.

Don't spend another cent with Google till you've checked out Facebook Advertising.

Why Facebook is the New Face of Paid Advertising

Facebook is pretty much untapped compared to PPC advertising on Google, Yahoo or Bing.

It's truly a "sleeping giant", an ingenious source of traffic that is...

    • much bigger than PPC

    • less competitive than PPC

    • more targeted than PPC

    • less expensive than PPC


  And what's more, Facebook's integrated personal profiles mean you can hone in on exactly the demographic you are trying to target - not just on keyword phrases, you can also target only Facebook members who are in particular age groups, regions and/or have specifically stated certain interest areas - it's simply awesome how deep you can get into Facebook - giving you massive choice and combinations.

Because of this, Facebook allows you to use the same ad in many different ways so you can really hit the hot spots of your users and their interests. Imagine being able to target by age, gender, film interests, AND keywords... you can really hit your message home.

So what this means in practice is that the clicks you get on your Facebook ad are immensely more targeted and convert far better and cost far less than what you'd achieve on Google Adwords.

If all that targeting isn't enough to convince you, here are some more benefits of using Facebook advertising:

• Facebook is also great for newbies. It's really easy to use and to set up your campaigns. If you can send an email, you can do Facebook ads.

• Facebook ads work in any market and will give a far better ROI than PPC, even for affiliate marketing.

• Facebook advertiser competition is minimal right now, so now is the time to tap into this massive source of traffic.

• Your ad in Facebook can include not only titles and descriptions but also images, which you can't do with PPC ads.

• Facebook ads leave little wastage because you can seek out ultra targeted members who are likely to respond to your offer.

Following the Facebook Rules

There is a downside.

Facebook is hugely protective of its users. So you have to really study and follow their rules. And this will take you some time.

The general rule of thumb stems from what is called "permission marketing". So make sure you check this out so you don't get your account cancelled.

6 Ways to Extract All Links from the Current Page

Seeing what a web page links out to is one of the major steps of SEO diagnostics process.
This way you can see which internal pages are given more emphasis to, which anchor texts are used for both internal and external links; you can identify some red flags of possibly paid links, research the site “neighborhood”, etc.

This post lists 6 tools to help you run the analysis of all links used on a page:

	Type	Internal vs External	Linked page info	Link details	Extract links
IWebTool Link Extractor	Web-based	no	Google PR	attributes (nofollow), title, anchor	no
Link Extractor	Web-based	no	no	Link anchor text	CSV
FireLink Report	FireFox (Firebug) addon	yes	no	Link anchor text	no
SEM tools	FireFox addon	no	no	Link position on a page	copy all / selected links
SEOquake	FireFox addon	yes	Google PR, incoming links, etc	nofollow	CSV
OutWit Hub	FireFox addon	yes	no	no	CSV

(Some details and screenshots can be found below)

1. IWebTool Link Extractor

(Web based)
Only 5 requests per hour are allowed for a free (and unregistered) user. The tool works pretty smoothly. The options include extracting links together with:

• Title / anchor text of each one;
• Full address;
• All the attributes (including of course nofollow);
• Google PageRank of the linked page (this one doesn’t seem to work properly):

2. Link Extractor

(Web based)
This is a basic but useful tool that extracts links from pages, displays them in a handy table including each link URL and link text (for image link it won’t show anything).
The best thing about it is that it allows to extract links to CSV file:

3. FireLink Report

(Firebug addon)
The addon generates the report containing all on-page links used on the current page grouped in 6 categories:

• Internal and external
• Internal only;
• External only;
• Absolute and relative;
• Absolute only;
• Relative only:

4. SEM tools link extractor

(FireFox addon)
This one extract links based on their position on a page.

5. SEOquake link extractor

(FireFox addon)
This one shows the wealth of linked page SEO stats:

• Google PR;
• # of results for SITE: search for the linked domain;
• # of links to the page (via Yahoo! SiteExplorer);
• Domain age (via Web Archive);
• Delicious bookmarks of the URL; etc

6. OutWit Hub link extractor

(FireFox addon)
OutWit Hub is a powerful web page info extractor that can also extract links. It has many advanced abilities and can be configured in multiple ways (including support for the custom scraper). The basic default link scraper:

• Extracts links;
• Sorts internal links from external ones;
• Offers quite a few various filtering options.

How to Use Google Analytics on Your Facebook Fan Page

Looking to integrate your analytical data and tracking across your site, blog and now even your Facebook Fanpages? It appears that the UK’s WebDigi Dev team has figured out a pretty easy way to use Google Analytics on your Facebook Fan Page. With SEJ’s Facebook Page having over 4,000 users and lots of cool comments and voting going on, adding Google Analytics to track referrals or time on site will be quite awesome.

We launched our Facebook fan page earlier this month and as with all Facebook pages only Facebook Insights program is available to page administrators. Facebook Insights shows demographic details and interactions on your pages BUT limited to show information of fans only. It is far less sophisticated and comprehensive when compared to the free Google Analytics. One of the limitations of Facebook Fan pages is that you can only run limited Javascript on it and Google Analytics needs Javascript code included to correctly track visitors. We have successfully managed to get ALL functions of Google Analytics working on our Facebook fan page (including visitor statistics, traffic sources, visitor country, keyword searches with all other powerful reporting & maps overlays etc).

Google Starts Indexing Facebook Pages Updates

Although both Facebook and Google has not yet announced this officially, some folks are reporting that  status updates from Facebook pages will start showing up on Google search results today. Of course, this comes hot on the heels of Yahoo’s announcement of their content-sharing deal with Twittter.

And so the race to become a real-time search engine is starting to heat up. Google of course was ahead of the game as it incorporated Twitter updates to search results as early as December last year. While recently, it has also started incorporating MySpace status updates.

But while Google’s deal with Twitter and MySpace includes status updates of members, the deal with Facebook is limited only to status updates of Facebook pages.  Of course this is understandable since Facebook has a much closer ties with Microsoft Bing.

And in case you’re not aware Facebook pages are basically accounts used for marketing and advertising purposes of  consumer brands so, there’s really not much real-time in this regard since those Facebook pages are rarely updated after all.

Makes me wonder right now, as to when Google will incorporate updates coming from Google Buzz to search results. Although I’m not really hoping that they would.