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up vote -1 down vote favorite

have a look at these two pages:

1) http://www.facebook.com/zvz.ro (PageRank 4 from Google toolbar)

Amazingly it has got NO links to it (you can see it with Majestic SEO free report): http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=it-it.facebook.com/jeanchristophe.cataliotti&fr=sfp (Yahoo SiteExplore is dead now, Microsoft already started to kill any useful thing that was given out by Yahoo for free)

2) http://www.facebook.com/poste.certificate (PageRank 1 from Google toolbar)

Still amazingly it has got NO links to it (you can see it with Majestic SEO free report) http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=18463182878&v=wall&viewas=0&fr=sfp

And the same results can be found for many Facebook pages.

How do you explain this?

Hoping for an explanation that goes beyond just saying that the PR in Goole toolbar it's not updated, because it can not be the reason for this!

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4 Answers

up vote 2 down vote

1) SiteExplorer is not Google so it can't tell you what links Google knows about. Google can, and often times does, know about more web pages and thus more links then Yahoo or any other search engine does.

2) Google's toolbar was known to guess at PR in the past and I have yet to hear of that not being true any longer. So it may be just a guess.

3) Internal links count to wards PR. Unless those pages are orphans, and they're almost certainly not, they're getting PR from other Facebook pages.

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About (1): even if SiteExplorer knows about less links, it can not be the case here, since Yahoo Site Explorer is showing NO links at all (it would have cought at least one). About (3) Internal links should be read also by Yahoo Site Explorer, unless thay are in provate pages where you need FB account to read them, but if this is the case how can Google read these links too? Does he log into FB? About (2) no comment! – Marco Demaio Mar 29 '11 at 16:53
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1) Just because SiteExplorer knows of zero links doesn't mean there aren't any. It only means SiteExplorer doesn't know of any. You can't make a direct correlation between what Yahoo knows and Google knows. That's just really poor logic. Google has a much larger index then Yahoo and thus will know about more links then Yahoo. In fact that's one of the reasons why Google crushed Yahoo in search. – John Conde♦ Mar 29 '11 at 17:12
3) Sure, Yahoo can know about them but that doesn't mean they do. They simply may not have crawled and/or indexed the pages with those links yet. Or possibly just haven't reported them yet. Basically, you're making poor assumptions based on faulty logic. – John Conde♦ Mar 29 '11 at 17:22
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You're still not being logical. Just because Yahoo has shown links to PR 0 pages before doesn't mean they do it for all of them. Their index is smaller then Googles and will be missing links a result. Especially now that they are outsourcing their search to Microsoft the current state of their search tools are in flux and possibly neglected and going away. Yahoo may be occasionally be good at mimicking results found at Google but they obviously failed to do it often enough to survive. To say they're as good as Google is an error and bad variable for any testing or coming to any conclusions. – John Conde♦ Mar 29 '11 at 18:28
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@Marco, I wouldn't call that extremely strange at all. And you can Google the Facbook/Google thing. It's been commented on quite a bit in the last year or two as Facebook as grown to become a big threat to Google. – John Conde♦ Mar 30 '11 at 15:28
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up vote 1 down vote

From what I can see, internal links between (user) facebook pages are with nofollow, so the question remains: from where do facebook pages take pagerank?

My facebook page is http://www.facebook.com/zvz.ro , has a pagerank = 4 and I didn't make any link to it. Why does it have PageRank 4 ???

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Agree, it's the same thing I'm asking in my question. Yahoo site expolorer does not work anymore, but with anotehr explorer like Majectic SEO you can see it. For instance your FB page seems to have only one incoming link from zvz.ro/contact but it's a page with PR0 so it can't be the one that is passing the PR. So as you said I'm clueless why you are getting PR4 on your FB page. – Marco Demaio Mar 20 '12 at 20:30
up vote 1 down vote

Everyone who has a public profile has a crawlable and indexable page all of which link back to most facebook pages. I'm sure there are many pages and ways Facebook is choosing to let Google crawl.

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Sorry, but I don't understand what your are trying to explain. – Marco Demaio Mar 20 '12 at 20:32
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SiteExplorer was never a good source of checking back links it was a select sample of links up to 1000 that Yahoo would show. When you're talking about why does any page on facebook.com have PR the usual answer is going to be that PR is flowing through out the entire facebook.com domain and making it's way to those pages. It's not a matter of back links coming from external pages all the time. In this case it's high amounts of PR flowing to the pages within facebook. Facebook may possibly give Google access to password protected pages to crawl, that was my other point – Anagio Mar 20 '12 at 20:37
interesting point. – Marco Demaio Mar 21 '12 at 16:41
up vote 0 down vote

Facebook pages have extensive internal linking and get a boost for social media. Every user that likes a particular fan page links to it off their profile info page. If a user's profile is marked as private it won't show up on yahoo's site explorer but will on google.

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Very interesting when you say If a user's profile is marked as private it won't show up on yahoo's site explorer but will on google, this could be the answer that explains the incredible situation. But where did you read this? I mean how do you know that Google can read into FB private pages? Could you provide a reference. Thanks! – Marco Demaio Mar 29 '11 at 16:55
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There is no social media boost. There are no arbitrary bonuses in search. – John Conde♦ Mar 29 '11 at 18:32

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