I also took your advice and added the BACKUP FRIENDS application. Do I do anything else? I don't know what the app does.
Thanks, as always,

Shari

I can not find a page in google that addresses this other than yours. Thanks for the post on this, it has been very helpful. Let us know if you find anything out.

So I think your SEO friend is partially right. If you Google just your name your fan page DOES come up but not until Page 2 in the results and it shows up as:
Links on “Allen Mireles Social Media Consulting” | Facebook

What's interesting is if you follow that link it goes to the Facebook equivalent of a Wall RSS of your Fan Page.

Now, as other people have commented, if you add the terms “social media” or “social media consulting” to your name the FB Fan Page shows up as 3rd or 4th in the rankings on the first page. It comes up in the same manner as mentioned earlier.

If you look at your Fan Page, on the left column your outbound Links to Twitter, etc are not active as they are on your personal page. Nor is the Info tab well filled out.

My thought is that Google is ranking the relevancy of your Fan Page for just your name combination as being low because a) much of the content is duplicate; b) there is far less actual content, some incomplete and few outbound links associated with your name, poor tagging on photos etc; c) most of the instances of your name occurring are in combination with “social media consulting”.

Hope that helps.

Angel

So I think your SEO friend is partially right. If you Google just your name your fan page DOES come up but not until Page 2 in the results and it shows up as:
Links on “Allen Mireles Social Media Consulting” | Facebook

What's interesting is if you follow that link it goes to the Facebook equivalent of a Wall RSS of your Fan Page.

Now, as other people have commented, if you add the terms “social media” or “social media consulting” to your name the FB Fan Page shows up as 3rd or 4th in the rankings on the first page. It comes up in the same manner as mentioned earlier.

If you look at your Fan Page, on the left column your outbound Links to Twitter, etc are not active as they are on your personal page. Nor is the Info tab well filled out.

My thought is that Google is ranking the relevancy of your Fan Page for just your name combination as being low because a) much of the content is duplicate; b) there is far less actual content, some incomplete and few outbound links associated with your name, poor tagging on photos etc; c) most of the instances of your name occurring are in combination with “social media consulting”.

Hope that helps.

Angel

My first thought was to build links pointing to your fan page, but then I realized that if they have just removed Fan Pages across the board, I doubt if a link building strategy will fix it.

I forwarded the link to this post to a friend who is an SEO Grand Poobah, and await his sage wisdom.

In the meantime I also did searches for Ashton Kutcher, Oprah Winfrey and Ellen D and not a fan page popped up even among these heavy weights of social media.

Sorry I couldn't offer more insight (or better yet, a solution).

Charles Brown

That's a good suggestion. I'm really not losing sleep over this but remain fascinated. possible answers are trickling in right now as a result of my tweeting the question to so many different people.

One theory is that Facebook pages have had a lot of spam and so Google is treating them differently now. Another, that this is not new and is, pretty common and happens when Google changes its algorithms. I'm less concerned about my page, which is young and growing, than about pages my clients might be maintaining or thinking about building.

Thanks for taking the time to stop back and post your ideas.

Beth Harte
Community Manager, MarketingProfs
@bethharte