Meta’s July Update to Index Individual Posts

[Savannah Jones TT]

Are you all noticing the new Meta update that's allowing individual Facebook and Instagram posts to be indexed by Google (and not just videos)? I've been seeing them pop up more in SERPs, especially for branded searches (working with funeral homes across the U.S.).

What's really interesting to me is the lack of consistency in how Google is displaying them. Sometimes the result shows the page name and uses the post's caption as the description. Other times, it pulls the first sentence of the caption for the title and the second sentence for the description. So it's a bit all over the place. With all the changes happening in organic search due to AI, this feels like an interesting new variable to throw into the mix. I'm curious to see how it impacts things like organic visibility, and am sure we're going to see a rise in brands trying to keyword-stuff their social posts for Google.

I'm also wondering if SEO reporting tools will be able to adapt to this change and track the organic visibility of these individual posts. I imagine the impact will vary a lot by industry, but I'm really interested to hear what you all are seeing and anticipating!

 

[Chris Barnard]

Hi Savannah, welcome!

Yeah, it's crazy the amount of change we're seeing, right!? This is one that has actually been out there for awhile - Google indexing social posts/showing on SERPs - in most regions at least. In my opinion, the keyword stuffing of posts wouldn't even matter. On the how it displays point, my guess is it's determined (somewhat) by the content/context of the post and how well Google thinks that relates to the query. But we can all test, hypothesize, and share...or not lol.

Definitely an interesting variable like you said!