Facebook URL Linter pulls data for wrong page

Question

My team recently launched a Web app that makes heavy use of Facebook's Like Button. Most of them work fine, but several of the Like URLs aren't recognized correctly by Facebook or its URL Linter. These URLs are for a page on our app that redirects to a corresponding page in a Facebook app...

Example URL:
http://www.3mframeworks.com/pages/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapps.facebook.com%2Fcouplespeak%3Fv%3Dvideos%26id%3D17

Facebook's URL Linter returns data as if the "id" parameter isn't there:
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/lint?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.3mframeworks.com%2Fpages%2Fredirect%3Furl%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fapps.facebook.com%252Fcouplespeak%253Fv%253Dvideos%2526id%253D17

Other Open Graph parsers return the correct data:
og:it: http://ogit.heroku.com/inspect?url=www.3mframeworks.com%2Fpages%2Fredirect%3Furl%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fapps.facebook.com%252Fcouplespeak%253Fv%253Dvideos%2526id%253D34
OpenGraph.In: http://www.opengraph.in/?url=www.3mframeworks.com%2Fpages%2Fredirect%3Furl%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fapps.facebook.com%252Fcouplespeak%253Fv%253Dvideos%2526id%253D34&format=html

I've spent hours searching for an explanation...

1. Facebook's documentation, under Editing Meta Tags, states:
   • "Note that og:title and og:type are only editable initially - after your page receives 50 likes the title becomes fixed, and after your page receives 10,000 likes the type becomes fixed." My Like counts are nowhere near these numbers.
   • "For the changes to be reflected on Facebook, you must force your page to be scraped. The page is scraped when an admin for the page clicks the Like button or when the URL is entered into the Facebook URL Linter. You can programmatically force your page to be scraped by cURL'ing the linter." I have tried all three of these methods without success.
2. Facebook Like button - fetches "wrong" image suggests that linting an URL doesn't reset the cache as Facebook claims.
3. Facebook Open Graph not clearing cache suggests this may be Facebook caching that will fix itself after an unknown period of time.
4. facebook like button liking wrong url suggests waiting 24-32 hours for Facebook's cache to be reset. It has been 64+ hours since my Open Graph tags were last set.
5. Why is Facebook returning the wrong page (affects Facebook Like and Share URL)? suggests that any URL provided to Facebook (e.g. via a Like Button) before being published should be changed. I tried changing the URL, renaming the id parameter, without success.

The most likely culprit seems to be Facebook caching, but it's already been suspiciously long and since this site is part of a currently live campaign that emphasizes Like activity, I'm hoping someone knows a trick to get this working ASAP. Thanks!

Answer 1

Some piece in Facebook's Graph API and URL Linter drops all but the first of multiple URL parameters.

Graph API

1. When the parameter string is "?v=videos&id=17", "id" is lost:
   https://graph.facebook.com/http%3A%2F%2Fapps.facebook.com%2Fcouplespeak%3Fv%3Dvideos%26id%3D17
   
2. When the parameter string is "?id=17&v=videos", "v" is lost:
   https://graph.facebook.com/http%3A%2F%2Fapps.facebook.com%2Fcouplespeak%3Fid%3D17%26v%3Dvideos
3. This doesn't happen if the Graph "id" parameter is declared explicitly:
   https://graph.facebook.com/?id=http%3A%2F%2Fapps.facebook.com%2Fcouplespeak%3Fv%3Dvideos%26id%3D17

Unfortunately that third point doesn't help my situation: I'm not accessing the Graph directly, so I can't just insert "?id=".

URL Linter

For my app, all parameters are needed to render the correct Open Graph meta tags, and the results support my discovery:

1. When the nested, encoded parameter string is "?v=videos&id=17", Open Graph tags are rendered for "3M Couple Speak Video Contest". This is the expected behavior when the "id" param is absent:
   https://developers.facebook.com/tools/lint?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.3mframeworks.com%2Fpages%2Fredirect%3Furl%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fapps.facebook.com%252Fcouplespeak%253Fv%253Dvideos%2526id%253D17
2. When the nested, encoded parameter string is "?id=17&v=videos", Open Graph tags are rendered for "3M Couple Speak Translation Contest". This is the expected behavior when "v=videos" is absent:
   https://developers.facebook.com/tools/lint?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.3mframeworks.com%2Fpages%2Fredirect%3Furl%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fapps.facebook.com%252Fcouplespeak%253Fid%253D17%2526v%253Dvideos
3. This doesn't happen with non-nested, non-encoded parameter strings:
   https://developers.facebook.com/tools/lint?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapps.facebook.com%2Fcouplespeak%3Fv%3Dvideos%26id%3D17
4. For other Open Graph parsers, switching the order of nested, encoded parameters yields the same data, which is correct:
   
   • http://ogit.heroku.com/inspect?url=www.3mframeworks.com%2Fpages%2Fredirect%3Furl%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fapps.facebook.com%252Fcouplespeak%253Fv%253Dvideos%2526id%253D17
   • http://ogit.heroku.com/inspect?url=www.3mframeworks.com%2Fpages%2Fredirect%3Furl%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fapps.facebook.com%252Fcouplespeak%253Fid%253D17%2526v%253Dvideos

Unfortunately, again, that third point doesn't help my situation: we need to nest and encode the URL.

This explains the bad data I'm seeing, and why it only happens to the URLs with multiple parameters. I submitted a bug report to Facebook.

Answer 2

The iframe source on that Facebook page is at this url it seems:

couplespeak-3m-production.heroku.com/videos

and that page contains the tags that show up in the Facebook Linter.

<meta content='3M Couple Speak Video Contest' property='og:site_name' /> 
<meta content="3M Couple Speak Video Contest" property="og:title" /> 
<meta content="website" property="og:type" /> 
<meta content="http://apps.facebook.com/couplespeak?v=videos" property="og:url" /> 
<meta content="http://www.3mframeworks.com/images/video_background.jpg" property="og:image" /> 
<meta content="100001154487117" property="fb:admins" />