Another recent online power grab involves Facebook’s changes in privacy SEO. Most of the information gathered in social networking is used to improve the relevancy of advertising presented to you (be it behavioral or retargeting).

Yet Facebook’s recent changes in layout and linking unveil an even more ambitious plan. They want to become a hub for all brands, products, and artists on the web.

It’s true that you can hide all of your fan pages in green that fit into Facebook’s pigeon holes of activities, interests, movies, books, or music. There’s a good chance that most listings here will have their own fan pages, except for books which should list authors instead.

(Mark’s profile information that is publicly available; the interests in green can be hidden but the section in yellow must be visible to everyone, even outside of Facebook, if your settings allow visibility in search engines)

However, when you log in, you can discover some interesting user experience decisions that determine the data displayed above.

Any interests that do not fit into one of their predefined fields shown in yellow fall over into a section called Other. As mentioned above, you cannot hide this field from anyone. Yet when you view your own profile, that is specifically the section that they obfuscate from YOU.

(Part of my profile information that is shown when logged in; the information shown in the yellow section is publicly visible to everyone but me while I browse my own page prior to clicking Show other Pages)

I could not understand this decision at first. Why hide a field to the user that Facebook is trying so hard to make visible to passers by? Because it is in Facebook’s best interests to keep users’ uncategorized pages public. These are typically the profile pages that have not been claimed by brands or celebrities, leaving Facebook free to create one of their own automatically generated portal pages like the comparison shown below in this example featuring my favorite journalist, Glenn Greenwald.

(Example fan page claimed by Glenn Greenwald at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Glenn-Greenwald/151584319478 vs. automatic Facebook portal at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Glenn-Greenwald/108402955851204)

These optimized portals on the right suddenly have hundreds or thousands of inbound links from all of the people who have listed the keywords in their profiles. With that magic, suddenly they have a curated database of what’s interesting matched only perhaps by search engines — with more potential SEO authority than almost any other site.

The destination portal pages are perhaps even more important than the Like button that has gotten so much press of late. The pages cobble together aggregated content on a topic, in the vein of Answers.com or ZoomInfo.com, with the largest social network on the planet.

Facebook is not just making the web “social”. Startups like Glue and StumbleUpon already did that. They aim to be alongside Wikipedia on the first page of search results for every corporate, personal, entertaining, or educational entity online. If Facebook pages ever become that pervasive, then it will be that much harder to compete for the top positions in already limited SEO real estate.