Open Site Explorer: Facebook Likes Accuracy

[fibers]

I show in open site explorer that I have 8 Facebook likes for my domain but I actually have 1500+ Facebook likes. Am I missing something?

[KaneJamison]

One of the tragic downfalls of Facebook Pages, in my opinion, is what you just noticed.

The 8 likes are referring to http://www.fibers.com

Your 1500+ likes are referring to http://www.facebook.com/fibers

At this time, there's no way to combine the two counts (which is just as stupid as it seems, because the likes for a domain homepage should absolutely be tied to the business page's likes, in my opinion). Unfortunately this is an inherent flaw in Facebook's open graph, and not something related to the SEOMoz tool.

So, if you go to put a Like button on your homepage, you have to make the decision of whether you want that to count as a like for your homepage (which may help your SEO a little, but does little to nothing for your Facebook marketing) or count as a like for your fan page (which is great for adding fans, but does little to nothing for SEO).

For what it's worth, I tend to use the Like button box using my facebook page URL throughout the site to make sure people are fans, then I'll use a page-specific like button on all of the subpages of my site so that people can like individual products, etc. This is also how SEOmoz approaches the issue if you take a look at one of their blog pages. On the sidebar you'll see the like box (pointed at their Facebook page), and on the bottom of the post you'll see a like button for that specific post.