SEO Tip: Facebook Groups ARE indexed by Google

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This isn’t breaking news, but Google definitely indexes Facebook Group pages and has done so since October 2009, as reported by AllFacebook.com in Google Now Indexes 620 Million Facebook Groups in February. I discovered it recently by accident and then went looking in Google to find out why I hadn’t heard earlier.

Yahoo also indexes these pages and while Bing seems to, I could only get 27 results.

The reason I am “breaking” old news is that hardly anyone has discussed this in the places where I look and a Google search is not very promising other than the above post, which attracted a mere four comments. Most of the other results are about “Facebook Pages are indexed; Groups are not” articles.

And that’s what I believed, because none of the celebrity SEOs seem to have mentioned it. I found one more fleeting reference by Pay As You Go SEO. All Facebook has a great article Facebook Groups Vs Pages: The Definitive Guide, which is worth checking out.

Here is a comparative table that builds upon the one in All Facebook. You will need to read that article for details.

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Implication for SEO

So what does this mean for SEO? Good news — because you no longer need to think of using just pages on account of their indexability. Use a Group where that is the right solution for the situation and rest assured that the content will also be indexed.

What to optimise

• The name of the Group also populates the Title tag, so choose this wisely.
• The Meta Description is FB boilerplate, so no benefit there.
• The Group Description field seems to be the text picked up for the SERP snippet in most of the examples I checked.
• The News content is also indexed and searchable, so there isn’t a lot for you to do other than using the best keywords without overdoing it.

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