Link Sharing FAQ
Updated: May 18, 2018
When your website content is shared on Facebook, Messenger and other places, the Sharing Debugger helps you understand what type of information is used to create link previews. This document covers many of the more common questions developers ask while troubleshooting their links and working with the Open Graph metatags on their websites.
Problems with image
My link image doesn’t render at all.
Images are cached asynchronously, so the image may not render the first time someone shares your content. You can avoid this by either:
- Pre-caching your image by triggering a scrape with the Sharing Debugger
- Using
og:image:heightandog:image:widthtags to explicitly designate the image
My link image renders as a white box.
The original image is no longer available, is too big or could not be fetched due to a temporary issue. Ensure the image URL is accessible to our crawler, is no bigger than 8mb and is served with less than a few seconds of latency.
When you change the og:image for a page, make sure that you do not remove the old image from your site, as then existing shares will show this white area.
My link image always renders with a small square.
Images smaller than 600 x 315 pixels but larger than 200 x 200 pixels will be rendered with a small, square image.
My link image is cropped incorrectly.
Many factors go into how an image may be cropped. For example, we try to center the image around faces that we can detect.
For large images, try to keep your images as close to 1.91:1 aspect ratio as possible to display the full image in Feed without any cropping.
My link image renders differently when shared on a page than when shared by a person.
Page posts always use a large, landscape image for link shares. This is the same across desktop and mobile Feed. Try to keep your images as close to 1.91:1 aspect ratio as possible to display the full image in Feed without any cropping.
My link has no preview at all, or can’t be shared.
Your link may have been flagged by our content filtering system. If you believe this is in error, please submit a report on our Help Site; be sure to include the relevant URL.
I want my og:url or og:image tags to use relative URLs, but the debugger complains about this.
All URLs must be absolute as they represent the canonical location of a resource (page/image), so that we can attribute shares and likes to the correct URL and cache images properly.
I’m told that I cannot update the title of my page (frozen), but the old title no longer makes sense.
We freeze titles after a number of actions are taken against that object (described here: Updating URLs).
I changed the URL, and now all my shares/likes are gone.
All shares and likes are tied to a specific URL (what we call a canonical URL). Changing the site structure to use new URLs will therefore begin attributing likes and shares to that new URL.
Please see Preserve Engagement Metrics for more information.
I migrated to HTTPS, and now all my shares/likes are gone.
All shares and likes are tied to a specific URL (what we call a canonical URL). Changing the site structure to use new URLs will therefore begin attributing likes and shares to that new URL.
Please see Preserve Engagement Metrics for more information.
I changed the URL, and now the crawler returns code 0.
The crawler will look for a AAAA record and return a response code 0 if it is not found. Ensure that your AAAA record is updated correctly when you change your URL or server.
Please see Updating URLs for more information.
I changed the og:image, etc., tags for my link, but old shares aren’t showing this new data.
Changing og:title, og:image, etc. only applies to future shares of that link.
Once a person or page shares a link, and there have been more than 50 interactions with the post (comments, likes, shares, etc.), then the title cannot be changed. This is to prevent a site from changing details of a link after you've interacted with it, making it look like you were interacting with something different. All other properties can be modified at any time.
If you've shared a link and updated the image, the original share will continue to show to old image unless you refresh it in the post.
To refresh the link image in a post:
- Navigate to the post in your newsfeed.
- Click the ellipses in the upper-right corner of the post.
- Select Refresh share attachment.
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