I have a Wordpress page that needs a GET parameter in URL.
Depending on the id, it shows a different flipbook.
The problem is, when I share the link on Facebook, it crops the GET parameters (I checked with the Open Graph Debugger), so the page doesn't receive any parameter, thus there's no thumb showed.
I already tried encoding the URL with PHP.
So, two questions:
Is it possible to make Facebook recognize the GET parameters in URL?
If not, can I work out something with the .htaccess file, to make them appear like subpages? E.g. www.page.com/flipbook/?id=7 would become www.page.com/flipbook/7/
The problem was SEO Yoast was automatically writing the tag:
<meta property="og:url" content="www.page.com/flipbook/">
So Facebook was reading this and not the parameter.
Related
I'm having trouble understanding canonical URLs with regards to how search engines and Facebook seem to handle them.
My Google maps powered site allows visitors to use social media to request a gig in their country. One of the pages in question can be found at: http://izzy.nogig.in/
When a user clicks on their countries marker it gives them sharing options (twitter/facebook/etc), which when shared will share the URL specifically for that country, eg: izzy.nogig.in/usa? or izzy.nogig.in/spain? etc.
All of these countries in the URL amount to a lot of duplicate content so I use the following to point search engines to the page I want ranked:-
<link rel="canonical" href="http://izzy.nogig.in/_?"/>
For Facebook Likes to count towards each individual country I've set my Open Graph "og:url" as follows, eg:
<meta property="og:url" content="http://izzy.nogig.in/australia?" />
Now when I run a country-specific URL through the Facebook Object Debugger (eg. http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object?q=http%3A%2F%2Fizzy.nogig.in%2Faustralia%3F) it shows the following:-
Response Code: 206
Fetched URL: http://izzy.nogig.in/australia
Canonical URL: http://izzy.nogig.in/australia
Mismatch og:url and canonical url:
og:url tag in the header is not the same URL as rel='canonical' link in the html.
The above error is what's confusing me. I know they're mismatched, but I thought this was the correct way to do this.
Everything in the debugger looks good to me (correct link, description, image etc for each country), and I can't change the rel="canonical" value to match my og:url as I need it pointing to a single page (country-less) for search engines.
I believe it is all working correctly. Should I just ignore the error from the debugger, or have I set this up incorrectly? I don't want "likes" for each country all disappearing and counting towards the rel="canonical" URL.
Many Thanks - Will
link rel="canonical" will be used by search engines where as og:url will be used by facebook
og:url basically tells the FB scraper "ignore anything on this page, and scrape this url instead"
More for Canonical link element: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_link_element
Canonical urls refer to page content.
The target (canonical) IRI MUST identify content that is either
duplicative or a superset of the content at the context (referring)
IRI. rfc6596#3
Opengraph url refers to "object".
The canonical URL of your object that will be used as its permanent ID in the graph, e.g., "http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/". ogp.me
So they may be different. For example, for multi-language websites, page for each language should have distinct canonical url, because content is different, but usually the same og:url for all languages, because they refer to the same object described in multiple languages.
On one of the sites I've developed I serve the page in more than one language, and provide links to allow the user to switch between one language and the other. So, my rel="canonical" will have the URL http://www.example.com/, whereas, within the code I update the og:url so that it is either http://en.example.com/ or http://fr.example.com/. That way when the user shares the page on Facebook, everything will appear on Facebook in the language they were viewing the page, which makes sense since most of the visitor's friends will likely speak the same language.
Regards.
I see no reason why og:url and canonical should be different. In both circumstances you're saying to either the search engine or Facebook what page you want to index or be displayed.
I recently changed domain name for my site and migrated my content. Most URLs from the old site use a 301 redirect to the new site, as you would guess.
In an effort to retain FB like and comment data, I kept the og:url property set to the old URL, since it is the original and canonical identifier in Open Graph. I implemented in August, and it was working properly, with previous like data retained. Now it is not working and showing previous like data, and fails in the URL Debugger.
Here is an example from the new site:
http://seattle.findwell.com/million-things-to-do-seattle/washington-brewers-festival-2011
In URL Debuggger, it now returns this error:
There was an error in fetching the object at URL 'http://seattle.findwell.com/million-things-to-do-seattle/washington-brewers-festival-2011/', or one of the the URLs specified via a redirect or the 'og:url' property including one of http://www.hometalkin.com/seattle/million-things-to-do-seattle/washington-brewers-festival-2011/.
Nothing has changed in my OG tags. Has something changed with canonical URL in open graph that causes it to fail when a redirect is in place?
This page:
http://seattle.findwell.com/million-things-to-do-seattle/washington-brewers-festival-2011
has this og:url:
<meta content="http://www.hometalkin.com/seattle/million-things-to-do-seattle/washington-brewers-festival-2011/"
property="og:url" />
but when you actually go to (in fact - when Facebook crawler tries to go to) this URL from og:url the site redirects you back to:
http://seattle.findwell.com/million-things-to-do-seattle/washington-brewers-festival-2011/
This is a circular reference.
In order to fix it you need to change your og:url to:
http://seattle.findwell.com/million-things-to-do-seattle/washington-brewers-festival-2011/
I actually had a very difficult time with this when I was first starting out as a developer.
I made a tool for this exact purpose -- as I thought it might be helpful to others:
Facebook/Open Graph Like Button Generator
It generates (and stores) the open graph tag(s) so you don't need to put them in your page and the 'Redirect URL' tells it where to send all the traffic.
It detects the Facebook bot/scraper too so it won't interfere with anything :)
Good luck
I had exactly the same problem.
I have changed my website url and I have over 40.000 radios with fb likes and comments.
Example:
http://www.radioways.com/fr/radio/nrj.html
to
http://www.radioways.fr/radio/nrj.html
I spend days and days reading and checking the forum and I did not find the answer...
Here is what to do:
1. In the og canonical, you need to put your old website url
2. In the Iframe url, you can put both. The result of the likes, will be the addition of the likes of the ogcanonical + the likes of the Iframe
An this will not work (and this is why I spent so much time USELESS) untill you validate those setup with FB
Best regards.
We are working on a facebook-app with lots of dynamic pages. As the app is embedded in a tab on a facebook page, the urls contain a get-parameter to address the correct tab/app. We want to implement like- and send-buttons for several pages within our app, but facebook seems to dump all get-parameters from urls within facebook. As the result all like- and send-buttons point to the facebook-page itself instead of the tab.
Does anybody now any workaround? We already tried redirects via an external sefor facebook urls only.rver but facebook seems to evaluate the links on click of the like-/send-button (and seems to follow all sort of redirects).
UPDATE:
Here is an example of a problematic url:
https://www.facebook.com/smartmobil.de?sk=app_171502639574871
UPDATE:
The problem seems to be independant of url get-parameters. It seems that the like-button does not work with any url starting with www.facebook.com
When used in a like-button everything behind the ? will be dumped. This seems to happen for facebook urls only.
Best workaround so far is to point your like buttons at external (non-facebook canvas) urls.
To make this work, you need to do some conditional redirecting to get the user back into your canvas URL. You can either use a client side javascript redirect:
<script>
window.location = 'http://apps.facebook.com/yourcanvasname/foo/bar';
</script>
Or you can do a server side redirect based on the useragent string. Basically, if the useragent contains 'facebookexternalhit' then render a basic HTML page containing OG tags, if not, redirect to the canvas URL.
Doing this means the Facebook sharescraper/linter won't follow any redirects back to the canvas URL, but any user that arrives at your URL will get back to Canvas.
i'm too searching for a solution to control the custom page tab's content through a get parameter (app_data). I still don't have a solution but here at least the reason why all www.facebook.com links are srtiped out of get params. Here at bottom the developer explains why.
Unfortunately I don't think what you are trying to do is possible. Posting a like programmatically requires you to specify a Facebook content ID or alias. This won't work for you because tabs to not seem to have an exposed content ID of their own, and instead use the Page's content ID with an additional parameter which you can't use with the graph.
Liking external links and other content that does not have an ID programmatically is prohibited. With an external URL, the first like of an unrecognised URL creates a new Facebook page for those likes to be represented on (which is the issue I've given up trying to fight), but presumably the presence of your Page's content ID alias (www.facebook.com/smartmobil.de) in the url is making Facebook choose you page rather than creating a new one.
The only suggestion I can think of this late at night is to target an external URL that performs a redirect via Javascript, rather than on the server, but Facebook may be wise to that too and I'm afraid I'm going to bed rather than testing it :)
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 have a problem with the Facebook like button. I want the note on user's profile to look something like this: 'User likes page on site'.
Site's URL it suppose to be 'http://www.example.com/myapp/' and the page URL it's 'http://www.example.com/myapp/page.html'.
I added <meta property="og:site_name" content="..."/> in the of any page and added the like button using <iframe>.
I know that there's a solution to specify the canonical URL, but for the page that user likes, not for the site (that is by using og:url on the header). Does anyone know how you can specify the site's URL? It somehow automatically points to the domain name, which it's wrong in my case because i need 'http://www.example.com/myapp/', not 'http://www.example.com'.
I want the following result: User likes 'http://www.example.com/myapp/page.html' on 'http://www.example.com/myapp', not User likes 'http://www.example.com/myapp/page.html' on 'http://www.example.com'.
Thank you very much for a possible answer.
We've been running into similar problems and in lieu of a og:site_url tag have had to get a little hacky. Our solution is to have our base URL (http://www.example.com in your example) redirect to the FB page.
As we add more FB pages, we'll need multiple subdomains to support this, so it's not really sustainable, but may solve your problem at least temporarily.