Facebook Like to Download and Page SEO

[ollie345]

Hello, I am adding a Facebook Like to Download button for each piece of free content on my website and wondering if a feature like that would be bad for the page SEO.

[Vijay-Gaur]

Yes, it's not a good thing for SEO to block users and robots from going through page content without Facebook.

Sometime back Quora.com had a similar feature, wherein they would let robots crawl the content and rank their pages, however whenever a real visitor would come to the page, they would ask for sign up / sign in before proceeding further.

This created higher bounce rate , google as well found out that something is wrong and they lost ranks. They have now removed the option and give access to full page to users and bots alike.

I hope this helps, please feel free to ask further questions.

Regards,

Vijay

[ollie345]

Hi Vijay and thank you for your response. I am not actually blocking a visitor from the full page, it's just blocking them from viewing the download link. Once a visitor clicks the like button, the download links appear. Is that still bad?

[Vijay-Gaur]

I don't think it would be a problem unless you are messing around with site data using this as a dubious technique for getting likes.

[mememax]

Getting on the root of y our question, I don't think this would hurt your SEO directly.

the only consequences (then you'll determine if you already took them into account or not) I see are this ones:

• if you're not allowing users to see the link, it means you're blocking google too, meaning you're not getting your pdf indexed
• it would be harder for tracking purposes, as you'll have to do double click, you can still track downloads but again I think things get a bit trickier
• As Ajay correctly says, you may have issues with the Policy team in FB, as you're forcing likes to get downloads. This was already discouraged from FB to get people to follow a page in order to participate to contests. I don't think it will be huge but you ahve to take this possibility into account.

My recommendation would be that if you want people to like your site, ensure you provide them a reason for it, not just force him to do so, you want engaged likes which may return back to your site not stand alone likes that will not match your real users pool. Hope that helped.

[ollie345]

The links are still showing in the page source code, so that would mean Google is still able to read it right?

[Vijay-Gaur]

Google might be able to read the link, but it's bots will realize soon enough that the link do not lead further to information/download page immediately on click.