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Yes your Facebook page will help your online presence; whether it really helps the "SEO" of your Website very much is debatable.  Here are some steps that will improve your presence in search results-

Complete the Basic Information in the setting tab of your page.  Within this ensure your NAP (Name Address Phone Number) is an exact match for how it appears elsewhere online.  Provide your website url both in the website box and in the About section.

Number of likes and shares are generally considered to be beneficial.  So continuing engagement etc is beneficial

I agree with @Anthony save your money and time.  Directories are becoming less and less relevant and paying for a listing in one is showing reduced returns.

Agree with you on protecting brand if the changes stick.

We hadn't noticed this until about 7-10 days ago and it seems like it's really taken hold within the past couple of days.  The effects on the non-local search results seem pretty significant. We especially noticed in on LinkedIn pages becoming highly ranked and much more information on Facebook likes, "talking abouts" and "were here's" --- also number of YouTube results being pulled back seems much higher than normal. The shear number of social pages being ranked on non-local search results was very interesting.  Appending local words to the search queries really seemed to strip out the social page rankings.

Thanks... we noticed a significant presence for LinkedIn company pages and also that Google is listing # of "Likes" and Page activity for Facebook.  This is a big swing to social that is not tied to Google+ and if it sticks would certainly provide a path to significant brand prominence in SERPs!

Has anybody else noticed that Google has made a significant change to their SERP?  There is a lot of social data reported from LinkedIn, Youtube and Facebook (includes page likes and activity) when you search by company name.  Thoughts anybody?

I think you have to be careful when leaving out "Stop Words" because there is not a definitive list of what is a stop word.  There are occasions in phrase search where it doesn't make sense for the search engines to leave out what seems like a stop word.  For instance "The Who" (rock band).  If you do a Google search for "and" you get results that refer to businesses and entities with "and" in the title.  I would stick with "and".

I have read in forums and elsewhere that car dealers are getting pinged by Google in the same way they dealt with Locksmiths.  This is due to the abuse of reviews by spiffing sales people to get reviews.

Of course SEOSHARK is right its crazy right now until they get the plus dashboard in place etc.  Google always phases things in step by step and then it becomes clear what they are doing.

I would also be concerned about messing with phone numbers - a consistent NAP is critical across all listings and lack of a local number is usually a negative

I believe the best way to proceed here is to change your quality backlinks to the new URLs as well as do 301 redirects.  In the end you are rebuilding your blogs authority at the new domain 301 redirects just help the process.

I agree with Marie somewhat, although we have seen sporadic results from well targeted domain names for some clients.  The truth is there are probably better things to do with your time and money.

I agree with @Anthony save your money and time.  Directories are becoming less and less relevant and paying for a listing in one is showing reduced returns.