Facebook and Social Startups Meme.

In 2007, Facebook created public search listings, that allowed people to search for your name and see a link to your facebook profile on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Bing. The public listings does not allow people to see your entire profile. The information displayed in public listings is limited to your profile picture, a list of your friends and around 20 facebook fan pages that you have joined.

A snapshot of a sample public listing could be viewed in the image displayed below.

There might be users, who might not want people to search them on Google and find out that they are on Facebook, although it is hard for me to think of some reasons for having this level of privacy. But nevertheless, if you are one such user, you can easily block this information from being publicly searchable by removing yourself from Google’s search index.

Hide your profile from Search Engines

In order to hide your profile from being indexed by search engines,  just go to your Search Privacy Settings page. Once you are on this page, you would find two options that you can customize, “Facebook Search Results” and “Public Search Results”. The default for “Public Search Results” is allow. Simply uncheck the “allow” checkbox to remove stop allowing the search engines from indexing and listing you in their search results.

Please note that once you have done this, you wont be immediately removed from showing up in Google search results. This is because, search engines take some time to re-index the new information. But be assured that within a few weeks, your facebook profile wont show up in search results on Google.

Recommended Settings

Getting listed on Google in one way or the other, is a dream come true for most businesses and professionals. Having a Google listing is not a bad thing by any measure. This could be beneficial to you in your job searches, for professional recommendations, brand building etc. So we would recommend that instead of removing yourself from Google search results, try to have a facebook profile that is professional and doesn’t embarrass you.