Why Facebook profiles are Google-searchable?

Why Facebook profiles are Google-searchable? - Google Search Console is a free application that allows you to identify, troubleshoot, and resolve any issues that Google may encounter as it crawls and attempts to index your website in search results. If you’re not the most technical person in the world, some of the errors you’re likely to encounter there may leave you scratching your head. We wanted to make it a bit easier, so we put together this handy set of tips about google-search, facebook, links, to guide you along the way. Read the discuss below, we share some tips to fix the issue about Why Facebook profiles are Google-searchable?.Problem :

Facebook has around 1B user profiles. They can be found by searching in Google. However, I don't think these profiles are linked from anywhere, so how could Google discover them?

As far as I know, sitemaps are not enough for that (https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/5151), as all URLs should be crawlable anyway.

I ask the question as I also have a site with user profiles and would like to make them discoverable.

Solution :

Contrary to what you suggest, profiles are linked to. Go to the Facebook homepage. At the bottom, you can see links to "People", "Pages", "Places", "Apps" and more. If you click on "People", you can see a full directory that's crawlable. As the disclaimer on that page notes, "This only includes people who have Public Search Listings available on Facebook."

Go to: facebook.com/settings?tab=privacy

In the last option: Who can look me up?

You can see: Do you want other search engines to link to your timeline?
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Facebook profiles can be Google-searchable just if you are +18
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If you think of all of the web sites where you can connect your Facebook account, that also have public profiles (think forums etc.). Many of these will link to the user's Facebook account, so Googlebot can crawl these simply by following links. There are also people like me who link to my Facebook profile from my own web site.

And then, if you visit a Facebook profile whilst logged out, you'll see that it links to other profiles. So Google should be able to crawl large parts of Facebook like it would any other web site.

As noted in one of the other responses, you can opt out of having your profile indexed if you so wish, but it's on by default (I think) for those aged 18+.

If the issue about google-search, facebook, links, is resolved, there’s a good chance that your content will get indexed and you’ll start to show up in Google search results. This means a greater chance to drive organic search traffic to your site.