I have a website at http://predictstat.com/. It's powered by Django. I would like to make sure that when a user posts a link from this website onto Facebook, a nice preview image, title and description show up there. This website can also be accessed by using a different domain name: http://percephany.com/. However, I don't really want to use that. I want it to be known to the world as predictstat.com.
To test the Facebook linking/previewing, I have been using the Facebook Debugger Tool. These are the meta-tags that are in my index.html page:
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<meta property="og:url" content="http://predictstat.com/" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://predictstat.com/static/images/predictStatLogo.png" />
<meta property="og:title" content="predictStat" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Online prediction logging and tracking" />
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
When I ask the Facebook debugger tool to scrape http://predictstat.com/, It gives me the following error:
Error Parsing URL: Error parsing input URL, no data was scraped.
However, when I change the meta tags to refer to percephany.com instead of predictstat.com, and then ask the Facebook Debugger tool to scrape http://percephany.com/, it works perfectly fine.
Why is this the case? Why does the Facebook Debugger tool like the domain name http://percephany.com/, but dislike the domain name http://predictstat.com/ when they both point to the same underlying website?
Related
I am trying to share my web page on facebook. However, it just shows wrong url,image and all other data crawled seems to be incorrect .
This is what I have as per testing :
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/arts/international/when-great-minds-dont-think-alike.html" />
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="og:title" content="When Great Minds Don’t Think Alike" />
<meta property="og:description" content="How much does culture influence creative thinking?" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/02/19/arts/international/19iht-btnumbers19A/19iht-btnumbers19A-facebookJumbo-v2.jpg" />
But it shows wrong data and none of the information from above tags is grabbed when sharing.
Facebook caches the OpenGraph data -- the data stored in your og tags. To reset the cached data, you can go to this page and ask Facebook to scrape your website again:
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object?
You need to press the scrape button to refresh the cache in Facebook. otherwise it won't refresh itself regularly. Facebook debugger screenshot
You can also try this simple web app to share with a custom image you want: http://come.toTheTerminal.com
The website I am retrieving images from is only accessible through HTTPS. So when I use Facebook debugger to scrape the page, it is only showing og:image, and that nothing is being returned. I need it to use the og:image:secure_url, that is defined in my code, but Facebook debugger doesn't even bring it in. The website I am developing is currently non-https. Could this be the issue?
<meta property="og:title" content="246 COUGARTOWN Circle">
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.builtincalgary.com/houses/details/?idhouse=1778551&issimplyrets=true/">
<meta property="og:image" content="http://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com:443/cdn.simplyrets.com/properties/creb/photos/80477609/1.jpg">
<meta property="og:image:secure_url" content="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/cdn.simplyrets.com/properties/creb/photos/80477609/1.jpg">
Alright so I have set my meta tags exactly how it says on the facebook developer page, and the scraper even shows the data that will be showed to be correct, but when using the facebook share button on my website http://www.etdigitaldesign.com/, all that it shares is the website url, it doesn't include any of the information from the meta tags, that the scraper says it should. No site name, no description, no image. just the website URL.
This is really confusing to me because the scraper says the share button should be showing the proper info, and I'm using a copy/pasted code snippet from the fb developers page, so I can't see what my error could possibly be...
here is what the scraper shows:image at http://i.imgur.com/zNIyhfg.png since I can't post images yet.
and here's my meta code:
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.etdigitaldesign.com" />
<meta property="og:type" content="website" />
<meta property="og:title" content="ET Digital Design" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Currently doing a grand opening special, making several free websites to get my name out there. Visit the site if you are interested!" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://www.etdigitaldesign.com/images/etlogobig.png" />
All facebook's examples have self-closing meta tags, so try that and then re-scrape, if that still doesn't work add a fake parameter eg http://example.com/?20 and scape
At the moment the title and image are showing, just not the description. It shows HHTP status 206,which is partial content, but that's not a problem
I have been struggling with this for many hours now and have not gotten anywhere.
I have the following metatags:
<meta property="og:type" content="website" />
<meta property="og:title" content="I'm going to see Speaker name" />
<meta property="og:description" content="This is the description of the speaker" />
<meta property="og:url" content="http://example.com/Speakers.aspx?speaker=35" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://example.com/test.jpg" />
<meta property="og:image:width" content="600">
<meta property="og:image:height" content="315">
After running this URL through the Facebook debug tool, I was given the following error message:
Object at URL 'http://example.com/Speakers.aspx?speaker=35' of type 'website' is invalid because a required property 'og:image:url' of type 'url' was not provided.
According to Open Graph protocol (http://ogp.me/#structured), the og:image & og:image:url are identical, but I tried to add it anyways:
<meta property="og:image:url" content="http://example.com/RGDDT/images/test.jpg" />
<meta property="og:image:type" content="image/jpeg" />
However the first 7 images on the page are still being scraped instead of the one I want to use.
Any insights would be greatly appreciated!
This is probably the best article on which metatags you need. Facebook requires you to have an id, in order to use even a Like button now a days. I don't see those metatags in your snippet. Try adding:
<meta property="fb:app_id" content="1111111111111111" />
<meta property="fb:admins" content="2222222222" />
The first is your app_id number, it seems you need to turn even your blog into an app to make Facebook happy. The second is your personal id number, you can also use your Fan Page if you have one. Including these things seems to make Facebook happy and I think you get Analytics for your troubles.
So I've finally solved this problem.
Problem #1: I was using 'permanent' URLs (/getmedia/3c87abee-1cd0-4ca3-a07d-b7d8fde8ec4b/irma1.jpg.aspx?width=437&height=434&ext=.jpg) instead of 'direct' URLs (/RGDDT/media/RGDDT/Speakers/facebook-share/irma-boom.jpg?width=600&height=315&ext=.jpg). This was a setting I was able to configure in Kentico (the CMS we have used to build this site)
Problem #2: I was getting the results I wanted in the Facebook debug tool, but they were being cached when I tried to share from the live site. Thanks to this article I was able to solve that problem by adding '&v=1' (or '?v=1' if you don't already have a query string at the end of your URL), so Facebook considered this a new page request and didn't cache the description I had hardcoded in as of this morning.
Everything seems to be correctly setup except I am not getting any administrative options. I have the Social Comments Plugin working, I even have the Open Graph tags properly setup and tested using https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug (Response Code:206) it does scream errors; except still no administrative options.
<meta property="og:type" content="">
<meta property="og:title" content="">
<meta property="og:description" content="">
<meta property="og:video" content="">
<meta property="og:image" content="">
<meta property="og:url" content="">
<meta property="fb:admins" content="">
<meta property="fb:app_id" content="">
This is the meta tags I am using. They are all correctly implemented and tested. I tried with fb:admins and fb:app_id on there own and together. I also have my Facebook User ID and APP ID correct as well. Still no admin features.
The code I am using to make the plugin work is based on exactly what is displayed here. It comments plugin is working. So I am assuming it should all unfold.
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/comments/
Something I am missing or is this feature not available for the comments plugin?
Update
I just did another test and added a bogus User ID and the debug did not display an error and excepted the fake ID. Shouldn't it have caught that?
I am reading that Facebook only Scrapes your page once every 24 hours.
Would this cause the problem? If it is can you clear this
You can cause facebook to rescrape the page by sending your url thru the facebook linter at: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/lint