How to ask facebook to **prescrape** my page information

Question

Users post quite a log of images on our website, we prepare OpenGraph tags with thubs per recommendations in https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/best-practices yet whenever user shares the image for the very first time, he often sees zero preview. Final share is usually fine, 2nd sharing is also fine.

Debugging in https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/sharing tells that our images are either over 8MB or take too long to load. Yet they are always around 100-300KB and even the first request ever to fetch them takes some 300ms (depends on the CDN node you are in, but definitely not a second).

So my guess is that facebook crawler actually needs some time to process the downloaded image and it can take time.

Can we somehow ask facebook to "prescrape" the page, to tell that this page is likely to be shared?

I was trying to use rescrape call for it, but it results in nothing as the fresh link was never shared yet.

Answer 1

This is possible by making a POST request to https://graph.facebook.com with the following parameters:

• id: URL to scrape
• scrape: true

A simple example with jQuery:

$.post('https://graph.facebook.com', {
    id: 'https://yourdomain.com/yoururl',
    scrape: true
}, function(response) {
    console.log(response);
});

Of course you can do this with PHP curl too, here´s more information about that: How do I send a POST request with PHP?

If you want to do it with JavaScript, i suggest using the Fetch API.