Facebook is constantly making changes to the News Feed to improve the user experience. Their latest effort hopes to reduce the number of links to low-quality web page experiences and to show more informative posts instead.
We’ve all experienced it, you’re scrolling through your News Feed and you see a great headline or photo that catches your eye. When you click on the link you’re presented with popups, offers, links, and general SPAMMY goodness. Frustrating isn’t it? Facebook has heard the complaints and now they’re taking even more steps to fight it.
Facebook is rolling out an update to show fewer Posts and Ads in the News Feed that link to these low-quality, misleading, disruptive or malicious sites. Similar to the work they’re already doing to stop misinformation, this update will help reduce the economic incentives of financially-motivated spammers.
There is a policy already in place to help prevent advertisers with low-quality web page experiences from running ads on Facebook, but now they are also taking into account Posts in the News Feed.
“With this update, we reviewed hundreds of thousands of web pages linked to from Facebook to identify those that contain little substantive content and have a large number of disruptive, shocking or malicious ads. We then used artificial intelligence to understand whether new web pages shared on Facebook have similar characteristics.”
If they determines that a post links to those types of low-quality web pages, it may show up lower in the News Feed and may not be eligible to be an ad.
How will this update impact your marketing efforts?
If you offer quality content through your Facebook Posts and Ads, you should see a small increase in traffic, but if you’re one of those SPAMMERS, expect to see a decline in traffic over the coming months. This update is only one signal that Facebook uses to rank the News Feed, so the impact will vary by publisher and their overall activity.
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Founder of Current Photographer, co-host of The Digital Photography Cafe Show, Designer, Photographer, and overall tech geek.