Facebook Algorithm Update Balances Content from Friends and Pages

Facebook introduce algorithm update

According to Facebook, ‘the goal of News Feed is to show you the content that matters to you’ – which is why they have recently implemented an algorithm change that aims to balance the visibility of content from friends and brands.

What are the consequences of the Facebook algorithm update for brands?

A statement describing the impact for brands was released by Facebook in a blog post last week:

‘The impact of these changes on your page’s distribution will vary considerably depending on the composition of your audience and your posting activity. In some cases, post reach and referral traffic could potentially decline. Overall, pages should continue to post things that people find meaningful and consider these best practices for driving referral traffic.’

Despite the somewhat uncertain effect of the update – there are some consequences that every marketer should be aware of:

1. The way in which content appears will change. Previous limitations which prevented multiple posts from your account appearing in the news feed will be lifted. If users are enjoying your content, more of it will be visible to them.

2. Organic reach will continue to drop as Facebook act upon learnings that ‘people are worried about missing important updates from the friends they care about’. Pushing this content to the top of the news feed will magnify the struggle that brands face in gaining organic visibility.

3. As previously mentioned, there may be a decline in referral traffic as a result of this algorithm change. User feedback revealed that they ‘don’t enjoy seeing stories about their friends liking or commenting on a post’, which helps to explain why this update has been implemented. This is particularly significant for marketers because it marks a complete shift away from what many rely on to obtain new organic visitors and fans, who often find out about content through referral.

Where does this leave us?

Of course, this all means that the focus on continuing to produce engaging and unique content is stronger than ever.

It also throws in to question the value of different types of engagement. By the sounds of it, the algorithm will only remove referral posts from content that other users have ‘liked’ or ‘commented’ on. Will this, therefore, make ‘sharing’ important and likes and comments redundant?

The increasing difficulty in gaining organic reach also marks a notable push towards paid activity, which will inevitably become a more intrinsic element of social strategy. Moreover, the social networking service is mirroring the direction of tech giant Google in getting brands to pay more to reach users.

It’s safe to say we’ll be keeping our eyes peeled in Google Analytics to track any disruption to results as a result of the algorithm change, but it will certainly be interesting to see how this one develops…

Fusion SEO Market Updates: March 2015

SearchUpdateMarch2015

Google limits crawling of sites with response-times over 2 minutes

Whilst it’s well known that having a site with a slow server response and load time can have an effect on your search results rankings, exactly what Google classes as a “slow site” has been up for debate. However, in a recent Webmaster Help thread, John Mueller stated that if Googlebot takes “over 2 seconds to fetch a single URL”, this will affect how your site is crawled. If Google views a site as slow, it will limit the number of URL’s crawled on your site, affecting how well your site ranks.

Google give more details on upcoming mobile-friendly changes

Ahead of its release on the 21st of April, Google have clarified a number of points regarding the mobile-friendlyalgorithm. The roll-out is set to run over the course of a week in a real time, page by page basis. Real time means that a site may benefit from any mobile-friendly changes made as soon as Google picks up on these, and “page by page” means that only pages on a site that are mobile friendly will benefit, rather than the whole site. Again, Google stated the algorithm will run on a binary “yes/no” basis, meaning there are no in-betweens; Google classifies a page either as mobile friendly, or not. Google have also released details as to the scale of the algorithm, which is set to have a wider effect than both Penguin and Panda. Although set to only impact search rankings on mobile devices, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that ignoring Google’s mobile recommendations could result in dire consequences in the coming weeks.

Google set to penalise doorway pages

Sites that attempt to maximise their search results appearance with “doorway pages” are set to be hit by a new ranking adjustment, Google have announced. Doorway pages are pages specifically created to rank highly for certain search results, often containing little in depth or useful information and simply acting as a “doorway” to a site. As such, Google views doorway pages as leading to a bad user experience, and with these ranking adjustment updates, no longer wants to rank them. If your site currently has pages that could be classified as doorway pages, it’s likely you may see a ranking drop in the near future.

More than 80% of HTTPS URLs are not displayed in Google SERP’s

A recent webmaster trends analysis discovered that over 80% of HTTPS URLS are not currently being displayed in Google’s search results, instead appearing as HTTP. This is something Google puts down to webmaster configuration, with many webmasters not using HTTPS versions in sitemaps, rel-canonical, and rel-alternate-hreflang elements. This means that although a site is still indexed, it appears as HTTP. Google have previously suggested that they’d prefer sites to use the more secure HTTPS, always displaying this variant if possible and even affording a small ranking boost to sites that use this. Although the benefits might not be immediately visible, it’s worthwhile for webmasters to use and make visible HTTPS on eligible sites.