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3 days ago I updated description within the meta tag of facebook, but change does not reflect when sharing link on facebook. Instead old description still appears. According to Facebook, it scrapes your page every 24 hours to ensure the description (and other share data) are up to date. However, one can manually refresh it by entering the post URL into the Facebook URL Linter

I did manually refresh it as well as now waited for 3 days. When i see debugging output from linter, it shows the correct up-to-date description, but old description still shown when sharing a link.

How to reproduce:

This is our website: https://www.tradeinsports.se/#tis1 (It's in swedish so bear with me please). If you go to above link and click on any of the two available products, and then share on facebook, you can see the difference in description from the one which appears in linter debugging output.

Any help would be appreciated.

wazzz
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3 Answers3

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Go to this page: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/

Enter the url and click 'debug'.

Click 'fetch new scrape information'.

There's a lot of good data on that page that's helpful for the social media aspects of your site.

Harold
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    Whilst this may theoretically answer the question, [it would be preferable](//meta.stackoverflow.com/q/8259) to include the essential parts of the answer here, and provide the link for reference. – Rizier123 Mar 04 '16 at 04:42
  • he's already done the coding. just get facebook to update with the instructions above. just get facebook to scrape the page again. this is how you do it. – Harold Mar 04 '16 at 05:59
  • What to do when the debugger doesn't show the right information? When I run the scaper, the description content comes back as blank even though it is actually populated. – Eddie Rowe Sep 13 '17 at 20:21
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    @EddieRowe are you using https? I've found that the fb scraper requires the full url including 'https://' when using https. With http, it's ok with 'whatever.com' (no idea why) – Harold Sep 17 '17 at 10:22
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If you're implementing a Facebook Share or Facebook Like button, and your og: meta tags are being ignored, it's probably Facebook's overzealous cache.

The quickest way to clear Facebook's cache, and force Facebook to use the info from your og: meta tags, is to Lint the URL.

Enter the URL of the webpage that contains the og: meta tags in the Linter, and Facebook will clear its cache for that page. Your Share or Like button should then start pulling the correct info from your og: meta tags.

Sathish
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  • sorry to say, but i did mention in the post that I have already tried updating by putting URL in facebook linter and also waiting for more than 24 hours. – wazzz Aug 29 '12 at 10:00
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    For me it worked perfectly. Thanks. Here is the URL to the Linter / Debug tool from Facebook: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug – Michael Helwig Jul 02 '13 at 08:57
  • Thank you Michael Helwig. it helped me out. – Eldho Dec 17 '13 at 12:26
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    @wazzz I'm having the same issue for my site. Tried to refresh the cache as described here in this SO question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5776567/facebook-open-graph-not-clearing-cache I even get displayed the up-to-date og:title and :description, still an old title is used in my shared links. Did you find any solution for this? – jessica Dec 15 '15 at 09:42
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I was having this issue too. The scraper shows the right information, but the share url was still populated with old data.

The way I got around this was to use the feed method, instead of share, and then populate the data manually (which isn't exposed with the share method)

Something like this:

shareToFB = () => {
    window.FB.ui({
    method: 'feed',
    link: `signup.mydomain.com/?referrer=${this.props.subscriber.sid}`,
    name: 'THIS WILL OVERRIDE OG:TITLE TAG',
    description: 'THIS WILL OVERRIDE OG:DESCRIPTION TAG',
    caption: 'THIS WILL OVERRIDE THE OG:URL TAG'
  });
};
Peege151
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