As you may noticed, Facebook Timeline now follow shorts URL (e.g. bit.ly, goo. gl) on your timeline.
Indeed, in the previous version, when you shortened and posted an URL (for example a post or a video), Facebook let the short link intact, and even if a small illustration of your final content appeared just below, a click on the picture OR the link quite simply follow your shot URL.
But now, when you post a short URL, even if your link is preserved, the link on the small illustration is the original non-shortened link! So Facebook seems to follow short URLs.
Can this be avoided? (keeping the small illustration is useful to arouse people curiosity)
In some cases (in particular to audit links), it can be very interesting to keep a link shortened. And I'm pretty sure that people click on the picture rather than the link you post. (>90%)
One solution would be to come up with your own URL shortener. Imagine you want the URL:
http://the-url-you-want-to-hide.com
to be shortened to
http://ash-short-url.com/xxxx
You have to make http://ash-short-url.com/xxxx load up a page with the following content:
<script>window.location="http://the-url-you-want-to-hide.com"</script>
The Facebook crawler will not execute scripts, so it will not follow that.
Related
I write a blog but now nothing about programming.
Until some time ago, whenever I shared a new post on FB it chooses the first image of the post and that was fine (although I'd prefer to control which one to share every time). And it also got the title of the post correctly.
Now it always chooses the header picture of the blog and inserts the blog's title and description instead. Also, if I try to share the blog itself it chooses not the header picture but some old one from one given post...
FB debugger gives me this:
"og:image was not defined, could not be downloaded or was not big enough. Please define a chosen image using the og:image meta tag, and use an image that's at least 200x200px and is accessible from Facebook. Image 'http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vVHBaAssg-E/VdiSUEICydI/AAAAAAAAApw/Tsmhu4ZefTk/s1600/dpca%2Bblog%2Bcover%2Bv3.png' will be used instead. Consult (...) for more troubleshooting tips.
To find the object, these are the redirects we had to follow"
But the pictures in the post (or the blog's header) are in fact larger than 200x200.
I've added code as suggested in FB and bloggers tutorials but still no juice...
What's wrong?
I'm using AddThis as the sharing "platform".
Example post: http://doportocomamor.blogspot.pt/2016/02/brincar-com-o-fogo.html
thanks a lot in advance
I write movie reviews and share them on Facebook. At first the facebook thumbnails would show the pictures I wanted for my reviews, like the movie poster. However, now they only show my blogger profile picture every single time I post a link. It's very frustrating because I want to be taken seriously and I don't want my blogger profile picture showing up every time I post a link. I tried the facebook developers debugging tool and it did nothing. Does anyone have any other suggestions?
Thanks!
I don't know to what extent you can modify the HTML code of a Blogger blog, but you can use Open Graph tags to define the exact image you want Facebook to show, for example the tag you want is the following:
which must have a 100px x 100px size at least. Note that this tag goes into the Head section of the site.
It has taken some time, but I think I have worked out what is happening, thanks to Facebook Debugger. Put the post URL in and then scroll down to "OPen Graph Warnings That Should be Fixed". You may see something like this -
Provided og:image could not be downloaded or is not big enough. Please use an image that's at least 200x200px and is accessible from Facebook.
Chances are your image is too small and that is why it is grabbing the profile image. I played around with my posts until I got it right, checking it through Debugger each time. It was a pain, but it worked.
I'm creating a web app which uses Facebook feed dialog plugin in some pages. When I try to share these pages, the URLs posted to the news feed get truncated.
I'm using the direct URL approach. When the user wanna share something, she clicks in a link that is going to redirect her to the feed dialog. The link is composed as shown below:
https://www.facebook.com/dialog/feed?app_id=MY_APP_ID&link=SHARED_URL&redirect_uri=REDIRECT_URL
For example:
the URL I have in the "link":http://www.simplecity.com.br/DP/Index/?CID=0&UID=1
the URL I get in the news feed:http://www.simplecity.com.br/DP/Index/?CID=0
Has anyone already experienced this issue? Any suggestion?
The usual cause of this is forgetting to encode the link when you pass it into the Direct FB URL.
Are you forgetting to urlencode the link parameter (i'm especially thinking of the &) when creating the URL you're passing the user to?
I recently encountered the same problem with a straightforward link - I inserted:
https://example.com/page.html
into a page post. However, on the page it was rendered as:
https://example.com/page.ht...
as if the last two characters of the html extension were merely not displayed, as indicated by the elipsis. However, if you copy the link from the post you find that those chars are actually missing and the link resolves as 404. If you edit the post and reinsert the link, it is saved correctly, although the 'overflow' characters are still hidden by the elipsis. Very misleading.
What seems to work best is if you use the Facebook Developer OG tags in the page and then use Open Graph Debugger to scrape the link. This puts the URL in the FB realm and it picks up the correct link just fine. As you are doing this, the debugger tool gives you feedback to the effect: "This is the first time we have seen this URL"; which is baloney if you have put the URL on a FB page beforehand.
I have filed a bug report with Facebook; but I am not expecting them to own up to this bug.
When sharing an article on facebook in a status, facebook generates a title, abstract and attach an image to the shared article.
For instance, putting www.stackoverflow.com in your status will geenrate
Stack Overflow
https://stackoverflow.com/
This is a collaboratively edited question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers. It's 100% free, no registration required.
(which btw: is not in the source code of stackoverflow.com page)
But when trying something like an article in news website, we get some extracted results from source code of the page (check any article in www.goal.com for example) ..
Any idea about the algorithm facebook uses for that ?
The meta data used by facebook to display links is always extracted from the html source code.
As #amit said, the description is present in the source and the title is taken from the title tag.
You can see that facebook is complaining though if you check that url in the debugger.
If you click the last link on the page (See exactly what our scraper sees for your URL) you can see the response the fb scraper is getting.
This source can sometimes differ from what you get in your browser (though not in this case) since some websites check for the user agent string and if it's the fb scraper (facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php)) then a different response is returned.
When we first put up a blog post, Facebook often (but not always) gets confused about what the page is. Specifically, if you try to use the Like button on the blog page OR if you try to share via the Share link on your profile, Facebook will see the root blog page rather than the actual post page.
For example, we recently posted:
http://thisorthat.com/blog/2010-song-of-the-year-round-1-results
If the user "likes" it, it returns the title for:
"http://thisorthat.com/blog"
When you run the post URL through the FB Linter, you can see the problem.
"http://developers.facebook.com/tools/linter?url=http://thisorthat.com/blog/2010-song-of-the-year-round-1-results"
In the Debug section it shows an extra og:title, og:url, description and og:image (the last 4 rows of the Debug section). This is the meta data from the root directory. What we cannot figure out is why. Why is Facebook seeing the correct meta data on the page and then also pulling the meta data from the root directory (and using that incorrectly to populate the data for the Like button and the Share URL tool)?
One other oddity. FB "figures it out" after a few days. Of course, by that time relatively few people are viewing the post.
UPDATE -- I want to thank Peter Bailey again for his answer, but we also discovered that there was another issue that we had to resolve before the Like button worked.
The issue was that we were displaying the Facebook the Like button on a post that was not yet published. The problem with this is that FB then can't resolve the URL and "guesses" as to the correct URL. In our case, it always guesses thisorthat.com/blog. Unfortunately, it then caches that guess for a number of days and that cache cannot be cleared by the Linter. So the ultimate solution was to both fix the og:type as Peter suggested, but also to remove the Like button from the blog post preview. It's very important that you don't show FB a page before it's published or if you do, change the URL.
Pretty sure it's your Open Graph type that's the problem.
<meta content="website" property="og:type"/>
Per the documentation
Use article for any URL that
represents transient content - such as
a news article, blog post, photo,
video, etc. Do not use website for
this purpose. website and blog are
designed to represent an entire site,
an og:type tag with types website or
blog should usually only appear on the
root of a domain.