Is linking from my Facebook page to my own site spamming Google?

[Tinus]

I never liked social media so I didn't bother much about Facebook. Last month however I made a page on Facebook for one of my sites. A little late maybe. I want to use the page to get some experience with Facebook. My goal is to attract visitors from Facebook to new pages on my site. On the Facebook page I shared many links to my site and advertised to get Likes (audience).

But now my question:
Did I make a mistake by linking directly from Facebook to my site? Does Google consider many direct links on a Facebook page as spamming? On other sites I would never place so many links to one of my sites without using a nofollow.

[lucy24]

Is it a direct link? As in <a href = "http://www.example.com/"> in the body of your page? Most facebook links don't show up in g### at all because they go via the "leaving facebook"* page-- the one you see in logs as facebook.com/l.php?u=your-page-here.


* I just checked. The page has a noindex meta:

meta name="robots" content="noodp, noydir, noindex"

But I don't find a "nofollow" anywhere.

[dethfire]

Everyone does this, I would bet my life it doesn't matter one bit to Google.

[netmeg]

No, link away.

[Tinus]

I used direct links but I see now that many sites use those shortend urls. For example the Facebook page of Webmasterworld:
[facebook.com ]

Netmeg, what do you mean with:

No link away

Should I delete all posts with links and replace them with those shortend versions? It would be a pity for the Likes.
(Those redirects seem to me very unsafe for users to click on those. You never no where you are going to).

[JS_Harris]

Facebook redirects all outgoing links and it's unlikely that Google can crawl the Facebook page with the link anyway so go for it!

[netmeg]

I mean feel free to link as much or as little as you like. Facebook is sort of a half-gated community, and what happens there shouldn't affect you in Google. It means it won't help you and it won't hurt you with Google.

[purplekitty]

netmeg is right. I post multiple status updates with links to my sites every day as I add new pages. It doesn't help and it doesn't hurt as far as Google is concerned.

[lucy24]

it's unlikely that Google can crawl the Facebook page with the link anyway

I've just remembered that this question came up before, and someone pointed to facebook's robots.txt. This is assuming for the sake of discussion that the file shown to a random visitor is the "real" robots.txt shown to named robots. It kinda looks like it.

User-agent: Googlebot
<snip>
Disallow: /l.php

... and the same for half a dozen other major search engines. Everyone else is globally roboted-out with a comprehensive / (all files everywhere). So "nofollow" is unneeded because search engines never even see the page the link is on, and "noindex" is... uh...

:: twiddling thumbs and whistling happily ::

Can google crawl individual fb pages? If so, they can see exactly who's linking where, even if they're not allowed to visit the page that officially takes you off-site.

In case anyone wondered, the other robots fb considers worth naming are: baidu, msn (but not bingbot by that name), naver, seznam, Slurp, teoma and Yandex. Helpfully listed in alphabetical order.

[Tinus]

Thanks for the answers. I am happy I don't have to change anything on Facebook.

[gadget26]

Think about this for a minute:

How sad is it that Google can cause someone to be afraid to link from one page they maintain to another?

Gadget

[chrisv1963]

Think about this for a minute:

How sad is it that Google can cause someone to be afraid to link from one page they maintain to another?

Since the first Panda Google basically destroyed the internet. Webmasters are afraid to be creative, afraid to link, afraid to do anything ...

[diberry]

I mean feel free to link as much or as little as you like. Facebook is sort of a half-gated community, and what happens there shouldn't affect you in Google. It means it won't help you and it won't hurt you with Google.

I second this. Google can't really make heads or tails of Facebook links so they are completely safe. It may not help or hurt in Google, but it can send a nice traffic stream of interested users.