Facebook has quietly launched a new feature that has the potential to significantly increase the page rank data that Google uses to track Web sites, potentially resulting in much higher placement during searches on Google for Facebook members and marketers.

The change was a simple one. Google searches Facebook’s “public listings” which up until now included a user’s name, profile picture, network and a few friends photos. Facebook has now added “pages” of which a user is a fan.

What that means in practical terms is that if a user is a fan of The Gap, U2 or Barack Obama, for example, that information is now a part of the user’s public listing. That in turn results in more links to the manufacturer or organization’s Facebook fan page which is what leads to more prominent placement in Google.

Here’s how that’s played out so far: The Gap’s Facebook Page just scored 12,000 new links, 188,000 links came in to U2, and a whopping 3,100,000 internal links lead to Obama’s Facebook Page.

Facebook describes the update to users as a way to make it easier for friends to find you in search results, but clearly it’s the marketers who will reap the true benefits.

Considering that Facebook turned on links to fan pages from about 120 million profile page public listings, the number of new internal links is estimated to have increased in the hundreds of millions.

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