We introduce an improved Ethernet ring protection method, selective filtering database (FDB) advertisement, to minimize traffic overshoot in the event of a failure or recovery. On the protection switching event, the proposed method makes all ring nodes perform an FDB flush except the FDB entries associated with their client subnets. Then, ring nodes rapidly exchange their client MAC address lists so that their FDBs are immediately updated by indirect MAC address learning. The proposed scheme guarantees fast and reliable protection switching over the standard scheme.