Facebook has come up with a system of identifying the most common phrases that are used in clickbaits by quack webmasters, website owners and SEO copywriters. On Thursday August 4th 2016, the social media giant announced its latest salvo in its war against clickbaits. In a blog post titled “News Feed FYI: Further Reducing Clickbait in Feed,” Facebook noted that its goal is to ensure that News Feed provide users the most relevant stories. To do this, the social media network wants to rank stories in a way that ensures that the most important stories appear at the top of the News Feed.
Ongoing war
The war against clickbaits has been going on for the last two years. Some website owners have been using clickbaits to drive more traffic to their websites without living up to their promises. In simple terms, clickbaits are article links that are placed on Facebook with headlines promising certain information that is never delivered.
In the future, the algorithm of this social network will scan posts headlines for phrases that appear to be clickbaits. Facebook has a team that has been running through article headlines with an aim of identifying headlines that inflate the experience of readers while lacking important information. The team flagged thousands of headlines which it confirmed to be clickbaits. The headlines were fed into the system for parsing them for phrases that appeared common among clickbait cohort. However, they were not categorized together with the non-clickbait group.
This is good news to genuine, professional SEO copywriters like Bishop Writers whose image has been tainted by quack website owners and webmasters.
According to Alex Peysakhocich, the data scientist at Facebook and Kristin Hendrix, the user experience researcher, this approach is similar to that of spam filters in emails. The dual wrote in the blog post by the company that announced the latest efforts to deal with clickbaits.
Not the first attempt
Facebook has been trying to eradicate clickbaits on several occasions. The first direct attempt was in August 2014. It sicced its algorithm for the news feed on links to articles that people clicked on and bounce back almost immediately and those with a large gap between clicks, comments and shares. Although this might have worked, it wasn’t enough.
This year alone, Facebook conducted user surveys as well as time spent studies. The developments that followed enabled its algorithm for the news feed to do a better job in sweeping clickbaits.
Whether the latest attempt by Facebook will bear fruits remains anyone’s guess. Just like in the past, the target of this social media network is not just individual posts. It’s also targeting pages that are publishing them. Links shared from and from pages that are consistently posting clickbait headlines will now feature at the bottom of the News Feed. Facebook will grant amnesty to the publishers of clickbait headlines if they stop publishing them. They will also no longer be penalized in their ranking in the News Feed.
Nevertheless, the latest attempt by Facebook to eradicate clickbaits is definitely good news to professional SEO copywriters and website owners. For help in writing quality SEO content for your website or blog, get in touch with Bishop Writers via bishopwriters@gmail.com.
