Facebook Instant Articles will Rank Higher than Standard Links

Will Facebook favor Facebook Instant Articles over standard links in News Feed ranking? This is Facebook’s official answer:

“No. Instant Articles are ranked in News Feed by the same criteria that we use to rank standard articles on the mobile web. News Feed ranks stories based on a number of factors, including the amount people interact with them and how much time people spend reading them.” — Facebook Instant Articles Team

This is actually somewhat of a misleading answer. Facebook Instant Articles and standard links are ranked by “the same criteria”, but what’s not mentioned is that Instant Articles inherently possess huge advantages within this “same criteria”.

This “same criteria” involves several major factors including load times, engagements, and shares. The New York Times, for example, said their Instant Articles are being shared more than standard links they post to Facebook so far, in part because it loads faster on phones.

“That’s not really surprising. We’ve learned in mobile that performance matters,” — Kinsey Wilson, ‎editor for innovation and strategy at the New York Times.

Number of shares is one of the signals Facebook’s algorithm uses to rank stories in users’ news feeds, alongside other factors such as time spent with a piece of content. That means Instant Articles may soon receive greater exposure across Facebook’s service than standard links to other websites.

Publishers and marketers have experienced a similar dynamic with video on Facebook. Over time, Facebook’s algorithm began to favor content uploaded directly to its service over YouTube videos, for example. A similar scenario might play out with Instant Articles.

The same can be said of the Google AMP Project, which is Google’s response to Facebook Instant Articles. Pages optimized for Google AMP load significantly faster, and Google has been using load times as an SEO ranking algorithm since 2010:

“Today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.”
— Google Webmaster Central, April 9, 2010

The Google AMP team also gave us a sneak preview of exactly how much faster AMP HTML pages are expected to be:

“So, how fast is AMP HTML? Pretty fast. In a sample of pages our early partners created we are seeing performance improvements measured through Speed Index between 15% and 85%.” — Google AMP Team

So there you have it. On a technical level, it certainly seems that Facebook Instant Articles will be favored in News Feed ranking while Google AMP pages will be favored in SEO ranking. On a business level, it certainly makes sense for things to be that way as well. These companies may not openly admit to it, but these trends are heavily implied.

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