Facebook Newsfeed Update to Reward High-Quality Content

When is the last time you logged onto Facebook and thought to yourself, “I don’t care about any of this content?” Thankfully, the social media giant has listened to the concerns of its users and is taking proactive steps to eliminate spammy “recommended articles” from newsfeeds.Facebook recently announced an update to its news feed algorithm that will start penalizing links to web pages considered “low quality.” The update will significantly limit the reach of organic posts and block ads to certain pages.“Some of the high-level things that we’re looking at are, does the page have a significant amount of original content on the page or is it just really a super skimpy amount of content that’s the least you could put to even have something to link to,” said Facebook Product Manager Greg Marra.To date, Facebook has reviewed hundreds of thousands of pages and identified those that lack substantial content and primarily post disruptive, shocking, and malicious ads. In turn, Facebook bots implemented a machine learning technique to recognize patterns and flag low-quality pages.