So Facebook’s push for Open Graph integration, where the “Like Button” replaces the direct link, creates new opportunities for businesses to focus on Facebook’s search mechanism. Some initial tests indicated that it is possible to now optimize for Facebook search, i.e. bringing SEO to Facebook.
Facebook Open Graph allows one to connect their site to Facebook without full integration, simply using new Facebook Meta Tags and the Like Button (a snipped of Javascript code). Facebook is tracking these likes and building a “graph” of the Internet based upon the recommendations of your social network, and now they are including relevant results when you search Facebook for something.
This creates an opportunity for companies that are bringing their brand to Facebook to get additional exposure through Open Graph, which creates an incentive to use the technology. This is exciting, as the move to the “walled garden” of social media threatened to disrupt the open world of search. In the past, users could recommend a page on their blog, creating a “link graph” for the search engines to use, but now it’s easier to just click “share” and send the link out to your friends that way. Without this part of the link graph, the search engines are missing out on the recommendations that they build their systems upon.
Open Graph brings out the ability to restore this, even if Facebook is the only company taking advantage of it for now.