Format of External Links on Facebook - facebook

I have seen when you visit a profile on FB and click on link provided in
Contact Information --> Website
Facebook first take you to url format mentioned below
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nwaonfire.com%2F&h=BAQByDCFo
and then takes you to the site .
My question is why facebook does so, Iam asking because there is a place in my application where iam allowing users to enter website urls.

...and the reason for facebook using the mentioned link instead of linking directly to http://www.nwaonfire.com is that facebook is evil.
They want to know which links are popular, where their users are going and where the link came from.
I also see a format as http://www.facebook.com/l/BAQByDCFo/www.nwaonfire.com where the BAQByDCFo is a hash value.

URL encoding is done so that a second URL can be placed within the first's query string without breaking the original URL. For example, implying directory structure by using the "/" character or breaking out of name value pair by using "&". If you're going to be embedding a URL as a query string parameter, you must encode it first. How you do this will differ depending on the language you're working with but most web based frameworks have a native or library based function to easily do this.

Related

Link query strings get cut off

I'm not aware of link designing strategies, so I am not sure why my link gets chopped off when someone clicks on from sources like Facebook etc.
I have a 'share feature' on my platform, which lets a user create a link to their listing and share it with people.
The link I generate for the listing in my backend has parameters, which reads the listing id and the type and displays content over HTML
Here's a sample link for a listing
https://www.fayvors.com/Share.html?hash=5eccccaa-7b8d-42bd-af8c-08d50da0c867?type=lessons/
However, when I share the link on facebook and click it, the browser redirects to a link that's cut off
https://www.fayvors.com/Share.html?hash=5eccccaa-7b8d-42bd-af8c-08d50da0c867%3Ftype%3Dlessons
I'm not aware of link designing principles, so I'm a bit lost here!
Thanks!
Your URL contains “special characters” (like a second question mark inside the query string), but you neglected to apply proper URL encoding when putting this URL as a parameter value into another URL:
javascript:window.location.replace('https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u='+window.location)
Use encodeURIComponent on the value you are concatenating to the sharer URL here.

What is the human-readable URL of this Facebook page?

The URL that I see in my browser is:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/665545990268762/
But it should have a human readable URL. Something like:
https://www.facebook.com/EntrepreneurialMums/
I need to know what it is because I need to put it on a sign.
How do I find out?
And why am I seeing this number URL?
AFAIK, you only get a readable URL in a Facebook group if you select one. An administrator can set it under Group Settings -> Web and Email Address
I believe facebook automatically assigns groups numbers like this. If you would like it to be human readable, then I would recommend using goo.gl or any of the other popular url shorteners. (I recommend goo.gl because it allows you to track clicks, if you are logged in when the short url is created). I would recommend using this in conjunction with a qr code.

AMP errors in web master tool

I have implemented AMP successfully for my webpages and google started indexing it, which I came to know via WebMaster tool. I am facing some issues which is present and disappears in short span of time.
Issue logged are:
User authored JavaScript found on page
The pages doesn't contain any script tags except schema.
This error is showing for few pages from 120 pages instead of following same
template. Below is the image link:
Have some more query:
I have observe different amp urls getting redirected to its original page when the same amp url is being used in Web Browser.
Is Google taking care of it or its on us to do the redirection?
I am planning to implement the sign in and share buttons on my web pages which will be using javascript. But if I do so, I do get validation error. So what is the right approach.
Can anyone please help me on this?
Please ensure that all script tags are of type application/ld+json. There should be no executable code in these script tags.
Redirection is something that you must be doing on your end. Google doesn't do any sort of redirection from AMP to non-amp pages if the URL is hit directly. In fact that URL schema that Google uses in their carousel is entirely their own, and just includes the path to your page inside it. E.g. https://cdn.ampproject.org/v/www.yoursitehere.com/path/to/article.html
Social sharing using Javascript inserted in the page is not allowed, as no Javascript is allowed. If you want to use social sharing, use a non-javascript implemention, or try out the amp-social-share
thanks for the response. As per the query which I asked
Please ensure that all script tags are of type application/ld+json. There should be no executable code in these script tags - I am not using any Script as of now except amp only
Redirection is something that you must be doing on your end. Google doesn't do any sort of redirection from AMP to non-amp pages if the URL is hit directly. In fact that URL schema that Google uses in their carousel is entirely their own, and just includes the path to your page inside it. E.g. https://cdn.ampproject.org/v/www.yoursitehere.com/path/to/article.html -
Understood
Social sharing using Javascript inserted in the page is not allowed, as no Javascript is allowed. If you want to use social sharing, use a non-javascript implementation, or try out the amp-social-share - Implemented Social Share and its working fine
Can we implement AMP for eCommerce sites where a lot of JavaScript, forms, plugins can be included? As of my knowledge AMP wants to keep it simple and thus restrict as many JavaScript, form tag is not valid only. So is there any chance we can implement AMP on eCommerce sites.

Tumblr share url

I've came across this page https://www.tumblr.com/examples/share/sharing-links-to-articles.html which shows a possible way to customly create a share URL for tumblr.
Simplified version of what they have:
Click to share
http://jsfiddle.net/m5ow6bhs/2/
This will take you to the log in page or straight to the share page if you're already logged in. However, if you change the http%3A%2F%2F part to a simple http:// it will now load to a "Not Found Page". http://jsfiddle.net/m5ow6bhs/3/ What the hell Tumblr?
Do you guys have any idea what's going on or what's the correct code to share something to Tumblr?
Cheers.
As with most share services, the URL should be passed as an encoded string. This supports the OPs comments about http%3A%2F%2F(encoded) and http:// (raw).
Tumblr provides variable transformations in the theme operators to handle encoding, but sadly it doesn't work with custom variables.
One quick solution is to drop the http:// part. Example: http://jsfiddle.net/L9jd8dhz/
I have discovered as of recently that the share URL needs to be updated as such:
https://www.tumblr.com/widgets/share/tool?shareSource=legacy&canonicalUrl=<-urlencode(share_url)->&posttype=link
The &posttype= seems to be a new requirement to make the share work correctly.

Adding a URL hash into meta data for Facebook and Twitter share cards

I am looking to use a hash that is given in through a URL (www.example.com/index.html#myhash) and use it in the page's metadata that Facebook and Twitter can then retrieve to make a share card like this: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards/types/photo-card. Is this possible? Or would it be better to just use a PHP $_GET[] variable? I'm trying to keep the page static so the hash would be ideal, but I'm fairly sure I can't dynamically create the meta tag with JS because Twitter and Facebook will not execute that code. Thanks for help!
Correct, creating the meta elements client-side will not work because those crawlers don’t execute any client-side scripting code, they just look at the HTML code they get.
And the hash part of an URL is only of client-side importance, so it does not even get passed to the server when making an HTTP request – so generating those meta elements server-side based on the hash is also not possible.
And finally, changing the hash part of an URL does not make it a different URL – so this is not compatible with Facebook’s Open Graph philosophy, where the equation is one URL == one OG object.