Last weekend Facebook offered search engine friendly usernames for its users, or vanity URLs, depending on your choice of terminology. However the choices it offered weren’t the best for
SEO, or the best for passing to friends. The first choice name, the one that most people would have selected, had a period in the middle of the name… and most people took it.
For example, if your name was John Smith Facebook offered you ‘facebook.com/john.smith’ – which isn’t a very good URL as domain names don’t feature periods after the TLD (top level domain). There was of course no reason for this, and shrewd people swapped their first choice of domain for one without the TLD, such as ‘facebook.com/johnsmith’.
Of course, if you’ve selected your domain already it’s too late as you can’t change it. Where fools rush in and all that.
For those who wanted to choose a username for their Facebook pages, but don’t have 1,000 fans yet, Facebook is opening it up for all pages at the end of the month.
