I've been dealing with the same issue since the beginning of July. My reach drop / penalty coincided with the New Pages Experience rolling out.
My Facebook Page is more than 10 years old. For the past few years, my link posts would get between 50,000 and 250,000+ reach per post, with 5,000 to 30,000+ clicks. All good.
But since the beginning of July, reach for link posts has dropped to 5,000 to 20,000 and clicks 500 to 1,000. And when link posts do get some reach and engagement, they still die off very quickly, as if they didn't get any engagement at all, and reach and clicks completely stop after an hour or so. This is just crazy. It's like my Page and/or website is shadow banned / penalized.
There are no mentions of penalties anywhere. Page Quality is green. Page Recommendation is green. Page Monetization is green.
I got Meta Verified just to contact Support. They said there's no penalty on my Page and it's probably related to "seasonality". Right.
I created a completely new website with a new domain and new WordPress theme and started posting links from there. At first, reach was much better, with 20,000 to 70,000 per post, and 2,000 to 10,000 clicks. But after a post got viral quickly and got killed by Facebook after a few minutes (post remained on Facebook, but new clicks and engagement completely stopped), reach on that domain also dropped and has been as low as my other domain ever since.
I also noticed that image posts still have some reach, but not as much as before. And some days, reach is also dead for image posts, which never happened before. I can publish links in the comments of those posts and get 1,000 – 5,000 clicks. But most days, I get almost nothing, so it's just not worth the trouble.
My conclusion? Facebook is penalizing my Page because it thinks I’m publishing links to spammy websites, or in its own words, Low-Quality Web Experiences. [
facebook.com...]
This is most probably a severe penalty and is given to Pages that publish links to websites that Facebook thinks contain spam. But the thing is, my website contains high quality content, very little ads and ranks really well in Google. So, there’s absolutely no reason for my Page to be penalized as such.
What I suspect is that something on my website is triggering Facebook’s anti-spam algos, and this might be what’s happening to your website and many other people’s websites. Unfortunately, as there’s practically no way to contact Facebook, there’s not much we can do about it.
This is how I think the Low-Quality Web Experiences penalty works:
1. Facebook's algos detect something they don't like on a website / domain and flag it as spam / Low-Quality Web Experience.
2. If a Page publishes links to that website, it gets a mild reach penalty for a relatively short period of time, like 24h.
3. If the Page continues publishing links to that website, it gets a more severe and longer penalty, like 1 week.
4. If the Page publishes more links to that website, it gets a very severe penalty (shadow ban) for 1 - 3 months.
5. At some point, Facebook's algos will reevaluate the website / domain and might remove the spam flag, but it can be flagged again if the "problematic" code / content hasn't been fixed / removed.
Previously, in one of its "transparency" updates, Facebook briefly talked about these penalties [
about.fb.com...]
"Doubling down on penalties for repeat offenders. When publishers repeatedly post content that triggers our quality demotions, we expect them to change their behavior. If they don’t, we implement stricter demotions for a set period of time to prompt faster, more comprehensive action. We will continue to introduce penalties for “repeat offenders” along with new quality demotions, to encourage publishers to be compliant with our standards."
The real issue at hand here is the fact that Facebook doesn't tell the publishers what their penalties are. So, without knowing what they're doing wrong, it's incredibly hard for publishers to "change their behavior." I would definitely like to "be compliant" with Facebook's standards, but it's almost impossible to do so without really knowing what rules to follow. And although they do publish some guidelines, it seems like following them still got my website / domain / Page in trouble.
I know a big Facebook Page with tens of millions of followers that had a similar penalty for months (maybe even years), and their penalty suddenly went away recently, so there is *some* hope. But they might’ve had access to a Facebook Agent (assigned to very big Pages) and got things sorted out. Other pages like BuzzFeed and Brightside remain penalized and have barely any reach and engagement on their link posts. Many other big Pages suffer from the same fate.
So, what’s next? To be honest, I don’t know. At this point, I am extremely discouraged. I’ve tried every possible avenue, but to no avail. Over the past 10 years, I’ve worked incredibly hard at building my website, Page and community, and I feel like everything was taken from me in an instant for no reason. I’m sure many of you feel the same way. I guess this is what being at the mercy of a tech giant feels like. Maybe I should’ve diversified. Maybe I should’ve never built this Page in the first place. There were some very good years, but it seems like moving on might be the only sane option at this point.
[edited by: janvitos at 3:47 pm (utc) on Sep 15, 2023]
