According to their own statistics, Facebook currently has more than 400 million active users. Of those users, more than 20 million become fans of Facebook pages every single day. It’s already been happening with Twitter, and now, Google is indexing Facebook Fan pages and displaying them in their search results.

We experimented with this a little bit today to find out whether or not this is already impacting Google search results. In order to come up with a result that all of us here recognized as a Facebook page and we know to be a very popular one, we did a Google search for “can this pickle get more fans than nickelback”. At the time we did our search, the actual Facebook fan page did not show up until the third page of results. Still, it’s better than not being there at all, as before, but I had expected for it to come up a little sooner, which sparked a discussion here on how Google is assigning authority to Facebook Fan pages.

Will you get more authority in Google if you have more fans, or is it just going to be based strictly on the requirements that Google has been using all along?

Either way, at some point I realized that on the Facebook Fan page they had actually changed the spelling of Nickelback to Nickleback to avoid any legal issues, so another search of “can this pickle get more fans than nickleback” moved the Facebook Fan page result up to page two of the results, given that it’s two letters more relevant. Pretty good, or at least, better.

Update: As of Friday morning, each of these search results put the Facebook fan page at number two on the list of results.

But it still didn’t satisfy my own curiosity of how Google would be assigning authority, or giving PageRank to a Facebook page. There has to be a little something else in the Google algorithm that is going to decide whether or not it’s going to be featured as a top result. So, I did a Google search for “how will google assign authority facebook pages”. Incredibly, the first result was actually a Facebook Note that was written by a person with a Facebook Fan page for their business. Well, that worked out well for them, didn’t it? However, I still don’t have an answer to my question.

So, what does it mean for those of us working in affiliate marketing world? It means one more opportunity for brand recognition, another opportunity to build links back to your own site and yet one more opportunity for people to find your page when they’re searching for content relevant to the goods or services that you provide.

Now, what I want to know is, when will I be able to check how many visitors I am getting to my Facebook page? Is Facebook ever going to provide us with some kind of analytics program?

What do you think of this latest addition to the Google algorithm, and how is Google indexing Facebook Fan pages affecting your business? Let us know in the comments section below.