Searching/Indexing Public Facebook Pages

[tcguide]

I maintain a web page of local musicians - many of them have Facebook pages. I'm able index their Facebook pages (by ignoring the robots rule) but am not able to get consistent search results to include the Facebook page when I search for a particular musician or band.

From what I can determine by viewing the page source, Facebook populates the meta description with generic Facebook marketing verbiage but each Facebook page does have a unique <title>band name</title>. Unfortunately, it is not clear what the page text consists of.

When I search for any of the words contained in the <title> tag fields for a particular Facebook page, I get mixed search results found - meaning the Facebook page shows up in search results or it doesn't. When I search for "Facebook" I get all Facebook pages - presumably because the word Facebook is contained in the meta description tags and title tags.

So how do I get consistent results to include Facebook pages? Does this have something to do with word relevancy?

Thanks!

[David]

Facebook pages are hard to index.
Besides problems of robots's rules and the URLs not having any file type, many of the pages redirect to different domains. Further there is a problem of indexing password protected pages.

The content of Facebook pages is also problematic. The HTML used isn't valid. It crashed the official W3 HTML validator when I tried it. Almost the entire content of each facebook page is Ajax and Javascript. Meaning there is practical no plain text to index.

Should be possible to index the page title however, but it wouldn't be too surprising if one of the other half a dozen issues above caused a problem.

[Ray]

You can disable a few things from indexing (such as meta description, if that is infact filled with Facebook marketing verbiage) under "Configure"->"Indexing options".

As mentioned above, Facebook pages are not really index/spider friendly. Not to mention that Facebook frequently change the layout of their pages, so it's hard to say what might work today, and whether it will work tomorrow.

The actual page content should be indexable from what I can tell. Maybe you should collect a bunch of links to the "About" pages for each band and only index that page (as opposed to the general profile page, with links to Walls, Likes, and Posts and other irrelevant stuff).

[tcguide]

I'm surprised an attempt was made to validate the HTML of a Facebook page. Just viewing the page source made me cringe.

The idea of indexing the info page for the bands on Facebook is a good idea that I will try since those pages contain blocks of text. Since my index contains links to a lot of traditional websites I can't disable the meta descriptions - so I will have to live with the Facebook verbiage.

My real concern is that I'm not getting the Facebook pages to show up consistently in the search results even when I search for terms contained in the Facebook <title> tags. When I search for "Facebook" I get all of the pages listed in the search results so I know I have the pages of interest indexed.

Any idea on how to ensure that the relevancy of the keywords contained in the Facebook titles will consistently show up in the search results?

For example, my search page is http://tri-citiesguide.org/zoom/search.php.

I have "http://www.facebook.com/BajaDunes" in my index and the Title shows "Baja Dunes | Facebook" but when I search for baja dunes I don't get any search results.

Any thoughts on this?

[David]

I looked at your site and it worked OK for me. A search for Baja Dunes returned 5 results, including the facebook.com/BajaDunes URL

[tcguide]

Do you believe in Gremlins? Search is returning Facebook results for Baja Dunes and other musicians this morning.

Not sure what was going on yesterday and I haven't re-indexed anything. So I will move on to fine-tuning the index...

Thanks.