Have you ever shared an article on Facebook and noticed that the shared excerpt and image were not up to date? This is because Facebook caches images and snippets of shared articles.
If your article has previously been shared or crawled, Facebook simply gets the corresponding snippet and image stored in its cache rather than getting them from your host. While this makes sharing faster, it can be quite frustrating if you have just made changes to your content.
To force Facebook to update the snippet and image used when your article is shared on Facebook, Messenger, and other websites, you can use the Facebook Sharing Debugger (URL linter):
developers.facebook.com/
To use it, simply enter the URL of the page that you want to process in the provided form, then click the "Debug" button to see the image and snippet currently stored in Facebook's cache. Click the "Scrape Again" button to update the cache. (Click it one more time if you still don't see the up-to-date image and snippet.)
If you want to update multiple URLs at the same time you can use the "Batch Invalidator" function.
You can also use the debugger to troubleshoot and fix other issues, such as if the "Moderation Tool" link is not appearing after installing the Facebook comments plugin on your blog.
Update (2017-11-06): For Instant Articles publishers you can use the debugger to "reclaim" a URL if you get an error message saying that the canonical URL is still not claimed after editing and trying to save an existing Instant Article.
Update (2017-12-02): When the Facebook Like button erroneously shows zero likes you can use the debugger to make it display the correct number of likes.
Labels: Internet