Facebook is attempting to reduce the amount of click-bait posts users see in their News Feed on desktop and mobile versions.

Click-bait, which in a post on the move, Facebook defines as “a link with a headline that encourages people to click to see more, without telling them much information about what they will see”, has become an increasingly common method to drive traffic to sites, both through promoted links and posts shared by other users.

While these kind of links often deliver a high number of clicks, Facebooks survey of users on the type of content they want to see showed that 80 per cent of peopel prefer headlines that help them decide if they want to read the full article before they click through.

Because previously the click-bait posts would register as popular, they had a tendency to appear on many peoples News Feeds, drowning out content that people really care about. In fact, it is so common on the internet that it has generated Twitter accounts and websites dedicated to parodying this style of article.

Facebook will be determining whether a post constitutes click-bait using two metrics – how long people spend reading the article away from Facebook (a short period suggesting they didnt find anything worth reading) and the ratio of people clicking on the content compared to those discussing or sharing it (with a high number of clicks but low number of Likes or comments suggesting the content wasnt valuable).

Facebook has also announced a separate update that will revise how links look, making them more likely to provide more detailed information on the content they lead to, and easier to click on when navigating the site on a mobile device.