Is Facebook Not Sharing The Correct Info From Your Website?

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By: Drew McManus

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Spoiler: it’s (mostly) not your fault. As if there weren’t enough reasons for Facebook to send content managers screaming into the night, one of their long-standing bear traps didn’t improve much in the past five years.

The Problem

You publish a new webpage or blog post and when you go to share, Facebook seems to be pulling up the wrong image, title, and/or description. Not only does the share probably look bad but worst-case scenario is it leaves out some of the most important conversion oriented details.

The same problem exists for updated content. While you may be absolutely, positively100 percent certain you updated a featured image or description. You can see the content right there at your website but when you go to share, Facebook is still pulling up the old info.

The Solution

One of the most common reasons you encounter this issue is Facebook has not yet recognized the new or updated content.

Even if you can clear your server cache, Facebook simply won’t have any of it. They scrape your info on their terms and let’s just say it’s nowhere near as frequent as Google.

To instruct Facebook to manually rescrape a page’s content, you can use a tool they’ve had around for more than five years: the Sharing Debugger.

Visit https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug (and be sure to bookmark it), you’ll need to be logged into your Facebook account in order to access the tool.

  1. Make sure the “Sharing Debugger” tab selected.
  2. Paste the full URL to the new or updated page.
  3. Select “Debug” button.

The page will probably reload with the new results.

I say probably because the reality is this is not a perfect tool and if you don’t see the new/edited content, you may need to select the “Scrape Again” or “Fetch new information” button one or more times before the correct content shows up in the results.

After a few attempts, you’ll finally start to see the correct/updated information appear:

If, after a few attempts, Facebook still doesn’t recognize the content or changes, it could be a sign that your website isn’t sending over the necessary tags. If that’s the case, it’s a big enough issue you’ll need to reach out to your web developer and ask why that’s happening.

Productivity Tip: if you’ve published or updated several pages, use the “Batch Invalidator” tab to process multiple URLs. Be sure to separate each unique URL with a space.

Drew McManus
Author
Drew McManus
In addition to my consulting business, I'm also the Principal of Venture Industries Online but don’t let that title fool you into thinking I'm just a tech geek. I bring 20+ years of global broad-based arts consulting experience to the table to help clients break the cycle of choosing one-size-fits-none solutions and instead, deliver options allowing them to get ahead of the tech curve instead of trying to catch up by going slower. With the vision of legacy support strategy and the delights of creative insights, my mission is to deliver a sophisticated next generation technology designed especially for the field of performing arts. The first step in that journey began in 2010 when The Venture Platform was released, a purpose-designed managed website development solution designed especially for arts organizations and artists. For fun, I write a daily blog about the orchestra business, provide a platform for arts insiders to speak their mind, lead a team of intrepid arts pros to hack the arts, lead an arts business incubator, and love a good coffee drink.
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