14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook is making some changes to the News Feed ranking algorithm and, as promised, it's detailing those changes and explaining the reasoning behind them.
A short while ago, Facebook announced that it would start making public all the tweaks and changes to the algorithm, the ones that would have a significant impact at least. In the latest change, Facebook is tackling low-quality pages and the content they spew out.
Specifically, pages that put out original content will be favored over those that reshare the same thing that's already been seen by millions of people on the site. Pages and posts begging for likes will also be downranked.
Facebook looked at several factors when coming up with a way of differentiating between high-quality pages and the rest, like whether the content they post is relevant or fresh, whether it's something that people share with others, whether it's a meme and so on. It then used the results to come up with a new ranking algorithm.
"The system uses over a thousand different factors, such as how frequently content from a certain Page is reported as low quality (e.g., hiding a Page post), how complete the Page profile is, and whether the fan base for a particular Page overlaps with the fan base of other known high quality Pages.
"Coming up with an algorithm to detect this is complex, and we will continue to refine it as we get more feedback," Facebook explained.
The changes are significant, but not huge overall, as pages that have good engagement now will continue to see the same and may in fact see an increase in activity, as their ranking is boosted, the company says.
Much like Google encourages websites, Facebook makes it clear that pages which want to rank well only have to focus on creating original quality content, which will always be favored.