Announced yesterday, Microsoft’s search engine bing will now favor websites that have been “liked” on Facebook by your friends. This obviously changes the rules of search engine optimization (SEO) in that it doesn’t seem to matter the PageRank of the website, if users are logged in to Facebook (as indicated in the top banner) then PageRank is favorably given to websites that your friends have “liked” or recommend. It does not matter if the website contains original, quality content, or even if it normally ranks far off in space of search results, as long as it is “liked” then it’s going to show up high.

So basically, now Facebook is going to control the fate of SEO and search engine results? At least for now, on bing it will. While it is still rather early to hear the responses of major SEO firms and other search engines, including Google, however that dramatically changes the rules of SEO, in the meantime.

Clearly, Google dominates the search engine market and it will be interesting to hear their response as this move breaks from traditional SEO. It’s interesting how there is an ongoing battle between the 2 search engines, yet Google is clearly in the lead with 84% market share, versus Bing’s 4%. We’ll update our audience as soon as more news develops.