Following on from Facebook's recent announcement to
reduce organic content and ads that link to low quality content [webmasterworld.com], Facebook is now making changes to cut back on clickbait headlines.
Facebook has said, "Posts with clickbait headlines will appear lower in News Feed. We will continue to learn over time, and we hope to continue expanding this work to reduce clickbait in even more languages."
First, we are now taking into account clickbait at the individual post level in addition to the domain and Page level, in order to more precisely reduce clickbait headlines.
Second, in order to make this more effective, we are dividing our efforts into two separate signals — so we will now look at whether a headline withholds information or if it exaggerates information separately.
Third, we are starting to test this work in additional languages.
[
newsroom.fb.com...]
I've rarely even been tempted by clickbait headlines, but I can imagine some people struggling to resist clicking through to these sites. I have experimented to see what's on these sites, and went for a surf, only to fine a whole stack more of clickbait headlines, and ad-supported pages. The idea was to trap users and to accidentally click on the ads. I'm sure you're familiar with these type of sites.
