I tried validating my urls using Facebook card debugger but it seems it's scraping home page meta data instead of the page I'm giving it.
The only error I'm getting from the debugger is: The following required properties are missing: fb:app_id. But, I don't think it's responsible for this.
To test:
URL I'm trying to fetch: https://creativeafrica.online/work/malik--mina-by-malikdouar
Home page URL (working fine): https://creativeafrica.online/
All this is working fine with Twitter validator.
On the URL you are trying to test, you have the following meta tag:
<meta property="og:url" content="https://creativeafrica.online">
This is redirecting the facebook scraper to the homepage. Update this, and it should work fine.
<meta property="og:url" content="https://creativeafrica.online/work/malik--mina-by-malikdouar">
Related
I have a single page angularjs web app. I'm trying enable it to be crawlable by search engines. To achieve this I'm using prerender.io, a nodejs webserver with a phantomjs browser to render ajax pages.
I am basing my nginx config off the following gist: https://gist.github.com/Stanback/6998085
This works for the most part. I can curl my app and get the correct response: curl -o test.html domain.com/?_escaped_fragment=/path
The request is redirected to the prerender.io proxy and the proxy makes a single request with the following url: domain.com/#!/path
All other requests (js, img, css and xhr) pass through nginx as normal. Phantomjs has no trouble rendering the proxy request after waiting for the following JS variable to be set to true: window.prerenderReady = false;
This is all great... Google can crawl my website! Enter Facebook.
I'm setting a number of OG metatags so that I can use the Facebook like button (iFrame). The following metatags are set for each page:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://domain.com/#!/asset">
<meta property="og:url" content="http://domain.com/#!/asset">
<meta property="og:type" content="website">
<meta property="og:image" content="http://domain.com/image.jpg">
<meta property="fb:app_id" content="xxx">
<meta property="og:description" content="foo">
<meta property="og:title" content="bar">
<meta property="og:site_name" content="domain.com">
These metatags are updated correctly by angularjs for each asset and the phantomyjs proxy correctly waits for them to be updated before returning the response.
However when I test the URL http://domain.com/#!/asset with the Facebook URL linter I get some problems.
Facebook claims that the canonical URL and the og:url differ, however when I click "See exactly what our scraper sees for your URL" they are idential
When I click "See exactly what our scraper sees for your URL" the canonical and og:url have been replaced with domain.com/?fb_locale=en_GB#!/asset
The proxy receives 3 requests. The first for the asset then it seems it follows the canonical and og:url
When a user clicks the Like this page iFrame the link back to my website looks like domain.com/?_escaped_fragment_=/asset
Number 4 is the issue that is a deal breaker. If a user likes a page on my post it goes into their Facebook activity stream. If that user then clicks on the link back to my site in their stream it will direct them through the proxy and render the page through phantomjs!
I'm guessing that I shouldn't be sharing the links with the hash-bang through Facebook. I think I should be sharing a link and setting the canonical / og:url to something like domain.com/static/asset. The nginx config should be updated to catch /static urls, if useragent = Facebook or params contain _escaped_fragment_ then direct to proxy else redirect the user to #!/asset.
I have tired all that I can think to get a modified nginx config to work with this however it has beaten me. When I intercept those /static urls and rewrite to the proxy randomly image, css and js assets are requested through the proxy and phantomjs crashes.
Could someone please help me modify this nginx config so that I can forward web crawler requests to the proxy, allow facebook to scrape the correct og tags off my site AND have the correct link-back url specified when users share my content on Facebook?
Did you figure this out yet? Facebook doesn't do a very good job with #! urls. This StackOverflow answer does a good job explaining it: How to handle facebook sharing/like with hashbang urls?
When a user is on a page on your site (http://domain.com/#!/asset) and does a sharing action on your website, it should share the canonical url http://domain.com/asset.
Then if a user visits http://domain.com/asset, you just redirect them to http://domain.com/#!/asset.
And if Facebook accesses the canonical URL (http://domain.com/asset), then redirect it to your Prerender.io server.
Or...just switch from #! to html5 pushstate, and you won't have to do any of the #! redirecting for Facebook. That way the proxy becomes more simple, so you'd always just proxy any request from Facebook to your Prerender.io server
I own this web page . In the start it did not have any facebook page, just a like button.
But now the site got over 1000 likes so I created a facebook page for it: www.facebook.com/Statsskuld
But the facebook page says 0 likes while I have over 1000 likes on the site. So I tried to connect my site with the new facebook page I just created.
I went to the facebook insight page and tried to connect it.
I pressed the "insight for your website" and selected "Statsskuld" from the dropdown and was given this code that I added to the header:
<meta property="fb:admins" content="257510024400990" />
But it failed. Multiple times, I tried changing to these:
<meta property="fb:app_id" content="statsskuld" />
<meta property="fb:site_id" content="Statsskuld" />
I also tried with my own personal ID number with the same result.
The error I get is:
No admin data found at root webpage. Insights requires admin data at this root webpage for the specified URL statsskuld.se
I then tried to use the facebook developer debugger, which gave me an error that I sadly not fully understod:
Object at URL 'statsskuld.se' of type 'website' is invalid because the given value '257510024400990' for property 'fb:admins' could not be parsed as type 'fbid'.
And thats where I'm stuck at.
I would really appreciate a bit of help, I have tried with multiple id combinations with (app_id, page_id, admins).
Is there a special url for sharing to Facebook and Twitter for mobile?
Or are they the same as those from websites?
Using
<script src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
Twitter
for Twitter and
<script>
function fbs_click()
{
u='www.something';
t='title';
window.open('http://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u='+encodeURIComponent(u)+'&t='+encodeURIComponent(t),'sharer','toolbar=0,status=0,width=626,height=436');
return false;
}
</script>
<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=someurl" onclick="return fbs_click()" target="_blank" class="">Facebook</a>
for Facebook.
Your sharing implementation should be the same and should work so long as your mobile users have devices capable or rendering JavaScript. Otherwise you can use each platforms' API url to share inside a link, the only problem is the callback redirects them either to Twitter or Facebook and they'll have to manually return to your site. The links are as below:
Sharing on Facebook:
http://m.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=<urlencoded url>t=<urlencoded title>
For example:
http://m.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://www.google.com
Updating status on Twitter:
http://mobile.twitter.com/home?status=<urlencoded status>
A couple of notes regarding Simpleton's answer.
The http://m.facebook.com/sharer.php URL may not be what you want. The site that you provide in the u query parameter needs to have some tags in the page in order for the share
page to be at all interesting. Just try putting another URL in there other than Google to see what I mean. I was never really able to figure out what it is looking for in the page of the site in order to show anything useful in your share page. I did not see any way to provide extra information about the site you are sharing.
The t query parameter is no longer read by facebook as far as I could tell
I found that the Facebook feed dialog was a better sharing alternative (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/dialogs/feed/). See the example at the bottom of that page for the information you can share. Paste that example URL in to your browser to see what it looks like. You can play around with the parameters to see what each parameter controls in the post. For example, if you don't provide the caption parameter, it seems that the base URL of the link parameter is used in it's place. To use the feed dialog approach, you need to register your app in Facebook to get an app_id that you will need to include in the feed dialog URL. You also associate your app with a web site URL, which you also use in the feed dialog URL. If you want Facebook to serve you a mobile-friendly page, append &display=touch to the end of the feed dialog URL. Lastly, you must provide redirect_uri parameter where the user will be redirected (with the post ID included as a query parameter), so you have to have something at that URL to handle the response.
Regarding the http://mobile.twitter.com/home?status URL, I learned a couple of things: first, any URL's in include in the status will not be shortened (bummer); second, if your status includes any single quotes, they will be encoded as ' (HTML entity code) but will not get decoded when your post the tweet. However, this doesn't happen if you are posting via the desktop, using the same URL. You can see what I mean by trying the following URL from both your iPhone (I was using Safari on iPhone) and then from your desktop (I was using Safari):
http://mobile.twitter.com/home?status=Wayne's%20World
Note, I do an javascript encodeURI on the status, but single quotes are not generally encodable characters by most URL/I encoders. There are some that will replace the single quote with a %27, but I tried inserting that manually and it still didn't get decoded in the status text.
I hope this information helps someone comes here looking for simple Facebook and Twitter sharing options.
Twitter - This is how I solved the tweet by url for all devices/browsers issue:
http://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text= + encodeURIComponent(tweet);
encodeURIComponent - is a built in javascript function, explained here.
The 'http://mobile.twitter.com/home?status=' is not supported, and you will get encoding issues when twitter requests a login.
Facebook - For facebook sharing I used Facebook API example
The url is ok, but you need to do some work on your server to get Facebook to really make it look decent. Facebook now uses "Open Graph", which allows you to add special tags to your web page that Facebook understands. You can define what types of media are on the page, even add your own objects with definitions you create inside your Facebook app. The link to the developer Open Graph objects page is Here.
A sample of Open Graph on a detail page might look like this:
<meta property="fb:app_id" content="YOUR FACEBOOK_APP_ID }}" />
<meta property="og:url" content="The URL that this page is on" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Your domain" />
<meta property="og:title" content="Title of your page" />
<meta property="og:type" content="This is very important - it is how
Facebook refers to your post. Image, video, text, etc. Even custom stuff is
possible" />
<meta property="og:image" content="image url for facebook to display on
the user's wall" />
<meta property="og:determiner" content="auto" />
<meta property="og:description" content="A description you want with this
content" />
And so on. This all goes in the <head> of the page of the actual url you are supplying to Facebook. Then Facebook will translate this into the appropriate post. In addition, you need to set up the Open Graph on your apps developer page, so that Facebook knows to look for the og: tags. It's complicated, but it does work.
Good luck!
My team recently launched a Web app that makes heavy use of Facebook's Like Button. Most of them work fine, but several of the Like URLs aren't recognized correctly by Facebook or its URL Linter. These URLs are for a page on our app that redirects to a corresponding page in a Facebook app...
Example URL:
http://www.3mframeworks.com/pages/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapps.facebook.com%2Fcouplespeak%3Fv%3Dvideos%26id%3D17
Facebook's URL Linter returns data as if the "id" parameter isn't there:
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/lint?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.3mframeworks.com%2Fpages%2Fredirect%3Furl%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fapps.facebook.com%252Fcouplespeak%253Fv%253Dvideos%2526id%253D17
Other Open Graph parsers return the correct data:
og:it: http://ogit.heroku.com/inspect?url=www.3mframeworks.com%2Fpages%2Fredirect%3Furl%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fapps.facebook.com%252Fcouplespeak%253Fv%253Dvideos%2526id%253D34
OpenGraph.In: http://www.opengraph.in/?url=www.3mframeworks.com%2Fpages%2Fredirect%3Furl%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fapps.facebook.com%252Fcouplespeak%253Fv%253Dvideos%2526id%253D34&format=html
I've spent hours searching for an explanation...
Facebook's documentation, under Editing Meta Tags, states:
"Note that og:title and og:type are only editable initially - after your page receives 50 likes the title becomes fixed, and after your page receives 10,000 likes the type becomes fixed." My Like counts are nowhere near these numbers.
"For the changes to be reflected on Facebook, you must force your page to be scraped. The page is scraped when an admin for the page clicks the Like button or when the URL is entered into the Facebook URL Linter. You can programmatically force your page to be scraped by cURL'ing the linter." I have tried all three of these methods without success.
Facebook Like button - fetches "wrong" image suggests that linting an URL doesn't reset the cache as Facebook claims.
Facebook Open Graph not clearing cache suggests this may be Facebook caching that will fix itself after an unknown period of time.
facebook like button liking wrong url suggests waiting 24-32 hours for Facebook's cache to be reset. It has been 64+ hours since my Open Graph tags were last set.
Why is Facebook returning the wrong page (affects Facebook Like and Share URL)? suggests that any URL provided to Facebook (e.g. via a Like Button) before being published should be changed. I tried changing the URL, renaming the id parameter, without success.
The most likely culprit seems to be Facebook caching, but it's already been suspiciously long and since this site is part of a currently live campaign that emphasizes Like activity, I'm hoping someone knows a trick to get this working ASAP. Thanks!
Some piece in Facebook's Graph API and URL Linter drops all but the first of multiple URL parameters.
Graph API
When the parameter string is "?v=videos&id=17", "id" is lost:
https://graph.facebook.com/http%3A%2F%2Fapps.facebook.com%2Fcouplespeak%3Fv%3Dvideos%26id%3D17
When the parameter string is "?id=17&v=videos", "v" is lost:
https://graph.facebook.com/http%3A%2F%2Fapps.facebook.com%2Fcouplespeak%3Fid%3D17%26v%3Dvideos
This doesn't happen if the Graph "id" parameter is declared explicitly: https://graph.facebook.com/?id=http%3A%2F%2Fapps.facebook.com%2Fcouplespeak%3Fv%3Dvideos%26id%3D17
Unfortunately that third point doesn't help my situation: I'm not accessing the Graph directly, so I can't just insert "?id=".
URL Linter
For my app, all parameters are needed to render the correct Open Graph meta tags, and the results support my discovery:
When the nested, encoded parameter string is "?v=videos&id=17", Open Graph tags are rendered for "3M Couple Speak Video Contest". This is the expected behavior when the "id" param is absent:
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/lint?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.3mframeworks.com%2Fpages%2Fredirect%3Furl%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fapps.facebook.com%252Fcouplespeak%253Fv%253Dvideos%2526id%253D17
When the nested, encoded parameter string is "?id=17&v=videos", Open Graph tags are rendered for "3M Couple Speak Translation Contest". This is the expected behavior when "v=videos" is absent:
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/lint?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.3mframeworks.com%2Fpages%2Fredirect%3Furl%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fapps.facebook.com%252Fcouplespeak%253Fid%253D17%2526v%253Dvideos
This doesn't happen with non-nested, non-encoded parameter strings:
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/lint?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapps.facebook.com%2Fcouplespeak%3Fv%3Dvideos%26id%3D17
For other Open Graph parsers, switching the order of nested, encoded parameters yields the same data, which is correct:
http://ogit.heroku.com/inspect?url=www.3mframeworks.com%2Fpages%2Fredirect%3Furl%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fapps.facebook.com%252Fcouplespeak%253Fv%253Dvideos%2526id%253D17
http://ogit.heroku.com/inspect?url=www.3mframeworks.com%2Fpages%2Fredirect%3Furl%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fapps.facebook.com%252Fcouplespeak%253Fid%253D17%2526v%253Dvideos
Unfortunately, again, that third point doesn't help my situation: we need to nest and encode the URL.
This explains the bad data I'm seeing, and why it only happens to the URLs with multiple parameters. I submitted a bug report to Facebook.
The iframe source on that Facebook page is at this url it seems:
couplespeak-3m-production.heroku.com/videos
and that page contains the tags that show up in the Facebook Linter.
<meta content='3M Couple Speak Video Contest' property='og:site_name' />
<meta content="3M Couple Speak Video Contest" property="og:title" />
<meta content="website" property="og:type" />
<meta content="http://apps.facebook.com/couplespeak?v=videos" property="og:url" />
<meta content="http://www.3mframeworks.com/images/video_background.jpg" property="og:image" />
<meta content="100001154487117" property="fb:admins" />
I am using Facebook Send button in 3 pages of my website. Before i send the message, the title, website and description looks fine. After i send, it shows up different title and different description in the message . I have no idea what's wrong in here? Is that my mistake somewhere or cache issue or something else?
Thanks a lot in advance!
Facebook has a tool called URL Linter. This tool gives us an idea about how a url will be shared on facebook, what content, which image will be fetched. We can use this tool for any url and it fetches the latest title, description, excerpt and other stuff that will be shown while sharing the link. If you use an already shared URL with this tool then facebook fetches the latest content, and also updates it cache with the latest content.
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug
At first you have to cross check and confirm that the url shared is of the right page, not the simple domain address. It will be better to cross check the following contents inside <Head> tag to make sure that you have done basic code requirements.
<link href="{URL OF THE PAGE}" rel="canonical">
<meta content="{YOUR FB APP ID}" property="fb:app_id">
<meta content="{YOUR PAGE TITLE}" property="og:title">
<meta content="website" property="og:type">
<meta content="{URL OF THE PAGE}" property="og:url">
<meta content="{LOGO IMAGE URL}" property="og:image">
<meta content="{YOUR SITE NAME}" property="og:site_name">
Once this is done, it should mostly resolve your issue with different title and different description.
If you still face issue, go to https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug
Input URL or Access Token and click DEBUG button. It will guide you if there is any errors in the in accessing the page by facebook.
Hope this helps.