Many times you will face problems with Facebook like button. Sometimes after writing a blog post, when you preview it, the facebook like button caches the title, description and the image. As the preview post page isn’t in real, I mean to say that its just a virtual post page, Facebook caches the blog posts with wrong titles, descriptions and URL’s. This means that when you share the post after publishing it will share with the wrong titles and other data.
For example,
If you preview post having permalink http://www.bloggingjunction.com/12345 FaceBook will cache that page with URL, http://www.bloggingjunction.com/ and titles or descriptions of the home page or 404 page as the preview page isn’t open for public and is not real. As these details get cached by Facebook, even when you publish the post Facebook uses the cached details for share and like buttons.
How To Solve This Problem?
METHOD 1 -> Change the URL of the post while liking it or sharing it.
You can simply add a query tag after the URL.
For example,
if the post link is http://www.bloggingjunction.com/12345 simply share the blog post with the URL http://www.bloggingjunction.com/12345/?123
You can replace 123 with any other numbers. As this URL is unique Facebook will cache it again and your problem will be solved!
But beware, this may also reset the FaceBook Share and Like counts if you do this on a site wide scale i.e. change the sharing URL’s of all the posts in your blog!
METHOD 2 -> Use URL Linter Tool from Facebook.
Simply visit the URL Linter tool at Facebook and paste the URL for which you want to check the details. Though this may help you see the Facebook Like & Share details for the link, this tool doesn’t reset the blog post details always. It worked for me once and when I tried for the second time, it didn’t [After all resetting isn't the purpose of this tool ;-) ]
I hope the above methods will help you clear your Facebook Shares and Like cache! Feel free to share your views and more methods to clear facebook share cache.
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Last Updated: February 23, 2012
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{ 35 comments… read them below or add one }
Maybe You could have shared the link to the URL Linter tool …Never the less thanks, this tutorial will come handy when the FB shares have been done with wrong titles
Sorry Shiva, I just forgot it! Added the link now! :)
very nice information.
thanks saksham
You’re welcome always Atish! :)
Great Tutorial and very useful post indeed. Though, i never faced this type of problem.
Anyways, Thanks for sharing this great post Saksham.
~Dev
You’re welcome Devesh! I faced that problem and hence decided to come up with this. Anytime face this problem, surely visit this post! :)
Good share….I haven’t faced this problem yet but will be helpful in future
Yeah, bookmark this ;-)
Thanks Saksham,
The URL linter tool will come in handy. One is never to old to learn! :-D
URL Linter tool will really help a lot! The tool is just superb for it gives us more information about our likes and shares. Like your last line… :D
Linter is excellent tool. Thanks for share.
Thanks for the comment instead! ;-)
This info was really useful. I could not get rid of old image for my like button. Using http://developers.facebook.com/tools/lint is fixing it.
Thanks heaps! This was just what I was after. The “linting” tool worked for me – ie. cleared the Facebook cache and told me about the extra meta data required to customise the appearance.
That’s great Lain. :)
Hi,
Thank you so much. It solved my problem :)
So nice to know that Armin :)
Linter is not clearing my page facebook cache
This tool is used to clear FB share page cache i.e. the FB like or share count :)
Thanks for shareing the Linter Tool. That saved my day!
WOW, you are welcome Robert :)
Wow you fail, none of this post works, you really should delete it….
The linter took also worked for me just for once. For the second time after I changed the domain name, and tried to flush facebook lilke cache with linter tool didn’t worked for me. Maybe there exists a minimum span of time that facebook will flush the cache? Thank you for the tip though.
I guess you are right. Are you a Wordpress user?
This does not seem to work anymore.
It worked for me previously. Haven’t got a chance to test it again as I took some precautionary methods :D Ex: I installed FB Like thumbnail plugin for WP which solved most of the problems.
I have too many urls’s to do this manually. Do you know of any way to do it dynamically for the whole website?
Sorry, but no. You can hire some one from Fiverr I guess to get it done for cheap :)
The Facebook debugger (linter tool) does not clear the cache for me. I’ve tried it many times over several days and my test ‘likes’ continue to display the old information. The debugger shows the correct information for things like the updated og:title, og:image and og:description. However, that updated information never shows correctly on my Facebook wall (when I’m testing). These are new ‘like’ buttons, so I’m pretty sure I’m not running into Facebook’s limit when they lock the information down and don’t let you change it. Any other tips?
Peterson, some time back Facebook has stopped users from updating a page’s details (description, image, etc.) SO by default FB now uses the default meta tags of that page while sharing if you like a page. This means that you cannot change a page’s image, description, etc when you like it.
Thanks for your reply. I knew something was going on. The behavior that I’m seeing is that Facebook does pick up the og (open graph) tags for a new like item you create. However, it does not update them no matter what changes you make or how many times you enter the page URL in the Facebook Debugger. Get the tags right the first time and all is good. Make a mistake or want to improve something and you’re out of luck — you can’t do it. I wish I could get a definitive answer from someone at Facebook. Thanks again.
Peterson, Really! FB should provide webmasters some kind of editing controls after all mistakes do happen! FB support is not that great, they take ages to answer and many times they don’t have an answer!
Thx a million, worked like a charm for me!
Thanks so much for this valuable advice – I thought I was going to be “stuck” with this problem!!
Thank you thank you thank you! After hours of looking, the URL Linter tool helped and fixed my Like button problem.