I'm seeing the same problem on my page since Friday August 31. My reach is down for all link posts by around 60% - 70%. The new Facebook algorithm seems to be penalizing my page for unknown reasons and periods of time. This has been happening since mid-April and has been on and off since then.
For the past month, all link posts reached between 100,000 and 200,000 on a 1 million fan page sharing mostly viral content (animals, humor, arts, family, etc). Since Friday, reach is down to 40,000 - 60,000. Photos and videos don't seem to be affected whatsoever and still get great reach compared to links.
The drop seems to have occured almost instantly as some of our morning posts on Friday reached between 90,000 and 100,000. But afternoon posts saw a huge drop, reaching only 20,000. Very unusual since most of our link posts perform best in the afternoon.
Since then, reach has been really low and can be easily observed through Google Analytics Real-Time. Good link posts will usually get 300 to 800 Active Users a few minutes after being posted on Facebook, but now only get between 50 and 100 people max. We also tried posting links from other unrelated web sites and pages and those links also performed poorly. So it doesn't seem to be specific to a domain. It seems like it's more of a page penalty for all links.
Some weeks, my reach will be great just as it was last year at the same period. Then all of a sudden, reach goes down by 60% - 70% and can stay this way a few days and sometimes even a few weeks. And then reach will eventually go back up again all of a sudden. But this makes it a real problem for those days where reach is down because the articles we publish almost get no visibility at all, regardless of the content. Our writers also feel cheated and hate it when it happens. Although they still get paid, they feel like their articles are worthless, when in fact they aren't. We've been using the same "recipe" for 4 years now and it always worked like a charm. We DON'T do click bait or engagement bait. We usually take English subjects from around the world and re-write them in French so they are adapted to our readers' language and interests. This is a common practice even for the biggest Facebook pages that still get great reach.
I have already tried many different things to try and get some reach back on those hard days but to no avail. Nothing works. It seems you just have to wait and let some time pass unitl the algorithm decides your page is worthy again. But this isn't a long term solution at all. We need to figure out what happens to our pages when they get this reach penalty. And I'm quite certain this is a penalty as I can clearly see other pages posting similar content that still get great reach.
The really bad thing about all this is that Facebook doesn't give you feedback about anything. So whatever you're doing wrong, you'll never really know why. It could be that Facebook's new algorithm takes the Verified Blue Badge (which we don't have yet) into consideration for better reach. It coud be that it mistakenly flags your page for doing click bait or any other forbidden Facebook practice. After all, an algorithm is exactly just that, an algorithm. It doesn't have judgement and it certainly cannot replace critical thinking. And Facebook's new algorithm seems to be lacking in so many ways at best.
