We just made a re-design of the company I work with of the company wordpress blog to make it more SEO friendly, improving all we could. However I still have an issue with the Google+ share button you can see we have 2 sets of social buttons 3 in the header (facebook, google+ and twitter) these are to share the site and 3 buttons at the end of the post next to "Did you enjoy this article? Share it!" to share the article.
When clicking the "G+ share" button the snippet plug-in is not using the metadata of the site like the title and description:
And in the documentation it says that's all I need, because I'm using the Open Graph protocol, but when I test it this is the result, which is not using the information set in the metadata:
https://plus.google.com/share?url=http://blog.voicebunny.com/2013/02/21/how-voicebunny-gets-professional-voice-overs-so-fast/
And the last thing I'm totally lost is when testing with the rich-snippets tool everything looks fine:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.voicebunny.com%2F2013%2F02%2F21%2Fhow-voicebunny-gets-professional-voice-overs-so-fast%2F&html=
Any idea how to fix the snippet? Thanks in advance.
To clearly document an apparent solution:
Putting a data-href tag as part of the that explicitly points to the page would make it clear where the metadata should be pulled from. Although there are other ways it can get this data (the cannonical link, for example), making it explicit as part of the button is best.
Not entirely sure, but I think you also have to update (or remove?) the itemprop meta at the beginning of your template:
<meta itemprop="name" content="The Carrot Chronicle">
<meta itemprop="description" content="The Official Blog of Mr. VoiceBunny">
Related
I've got the Facebook SDK working to auto post blog posts to my Facebook page, but I can't seem to get the post byline/author to appear.
If I share the URL directly to the page, the the article author will show up, but it doesn't with the SDK.
The docs show a variety of variables you can send, but no examples or much more information. The two options which look promising are admin_creator or from.
admin_creator says it requires an object[] with id and name but no examples to show what and how to pass this to the API. Anything I've tried doesn't work (such as profile ID and profile name), and the from I've tried passing a profile ID to no avail.
If anyone has done this can you help? Thanks!
SDK docs ref: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/v2.8/post/
Shared manually:
via SDK:
Does the metatag "Author" exist in your articles? Try to use the Object Debugger (https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object/) and check if the "Author"'s name comes out. If not, the first thing is to understand why it doesn't appear.
Option 1: you missed the metatag in your code.
<meta name="author" content="Your name">
You can also add these metatags. The first one explicit the object type (article) while the second one links the author's name to an URL (like your FB's profile page):
<meta property="og:type" content="article"/>
<meta property="article:author" content="yourlink.com"/>
Option 2: if you're already using all these metatags you may have some cache problem. Are you sure that the Facebook Spider's can read your metatags? Maybe are you exposing a version of the article that misses the metatags?
I think i am having some critical meta tag issue in my website. When i search my website in google, In the search result, Website title and name showing correct information but in place of description some other content is showing which is not the meta description content but some parts of the content of my website's home page. My website is developed in PHP-based opensource opencart.
i searched a lot to resolve it but still i got no solution. I have no previous experience in seo that makes me estimate something without sufficient information to be sure where the error is. If anyone helps me out here that would be really great. I attached an screenshot for better understanding.
Firstly, ensure that you are following the structure which is shown in https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en
This means that your tag should look like this:
<meta name="description" content="A description of the page" />
Something that could be causing this problem is that Google does not update descriptions automatically- so you may have to wait until they crawl your website again, for it to update (you could use the Google Webmaster systems to encourage this).
Google will sometimes use the meta description of a page in search
results snippets, if we think it gives users a more accurate
description than would be possible purely from the on-page content
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?rd=1
google only sometimes uses your meta description. Other times, it uses page content.
I am try to get for my joomla 2.5 website the feature of facebook "preview link". This feature should generate a preview when I enter a link in my article (just like facebook does in the status field). I only need this features for link to text/images not to video.
I found this link but I am having difficulties to understand how I am suppose to implementing it into a joomla website.
Thanks a lot for your help!
To dictate what is used for a Facebook link in your content, you need to make use of the Facebook OpenGraph meta tags.
Take a look at this section of the Facebook Developers site, mainly Section 3: Use proper Open Graph tags.
Link Here
The three you need for what you're after are:
<meta property="og:title" content="MyContentTitle" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Enter your snippet here." />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://myurl.com/images/logo-100x100.jpg " />
You can either statically set these for your website, or manipulate the template files for your articles, and echo out the article titles/images/snippets using PHP.
//EDIT//
After clarification from the comments, the easiest method would be to add tooltips using jQuery/jQuery UI:
jQuery UI Tooltips
You can make the tooltips as large as you like, so you could add a preview of the article that is leads to.
Of course, you'll have to make changes to your site template to add this, and also include jQuery UI/jQuery to your template header, if it's not there already.
In addition to that, you'll need to use PHP to echo the article title, description and image within the tooltip.
The Linkedin documentation can be found here
As it says, it needs:
og:title
og:description
og:image
og:url
Here is an example of my wordpress blog source code that for simplicity I use Jetpack plug-in:
<!-- Jetpack Open Graph Tags -->
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="og:title" content="Starbucks Netherlands Intel" />
<meta property="og:url" content="http://lorentzos.com/starbucks-netherlands-intel/" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Today I had some free time at work. I wanted to play more with Foursquare APIs. So the question: "What is the correlation of the Starbucks Chain in the Netherlands?". Methodology: I found all the p..." />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Dionysis Lorentzos" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://lorentzos.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/starbucks-intel-nl-238x300.png" />
In Facebook it works great, or you can see the meta data here. However LinkedIn is more stubborn and doesn't really parse the data even the If you're unable to set Open Graph tags within the page that's being shared, LinkedIn will attempt to fetch the content automatically by determining the title, description, thumbnail image, etc.
I know that I don't have the og:image:width tag but Linkedin doesn't even parse title, description or url. Any ideas to debug it?
I checked again my html and found some warnings/errors in metadata. I fixed them and all work good. So the solution if you encounter the same problem:
Check your html again and debug it. Even if the page load well in your browser, the LinkedIn parser is not as powerful in terms of small errors. This tool might help.
My very first suggestion is appending a meaningless query to the URL, so that LinkedIn thinks it's a new link (this doesn't affect anything else) i.e.:
http://example.com/link.php?42 or http://example.com/link.html?refid=LinkedIn
If that doesn't suit your needs, a more drastic measure is in order.
After making sure you don't have any errors in your console and validating your site using:
http://validator.w3.org/...
Add the prefix attribute to every tag (not to html tag), then re-sign in with your LinkedIn account to clear the cache...
prefix="go: http://ogp.me/ns#" i.e.:
<meta prefix="og: http://ogp.me/ns#" property="og:title" content="Title of Page" />
<meta prefix="og: http://ogp.me/ns#" property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta prefix="og: http://ogp.me/ns#" property="og:image" content="http://example.com/image.jpg" />
<meta prefix="og: http://ogp.me/ns#" property="og:url" content="http://example.com/" />
I hope one of these three solutions works for someone. Cheers!
If you're sure you've done everything right (using open graph meta tags, no errors on validator.w3.org) and it still is not working, be sure to try it with a different page, it might be a LinkedIn cache thing.
I had a <h1>Project information</h1> on my page, which LinkedIn used as the title for sharing the page, instead of the <title> or <meta property="og:title" [...]/> tag. Even though I did everything right. But when I completely removed this <h1>Project information</h1> from the page source, it kept using 'Project information' as the title even thought it wasn't on the page anymore.
After trying a different page, it worked.
I stumbled about the same problem for our Wordpress site. The problem is created by conflicting OGP and oembed headers in standard wordpress + yoast / jetpack seo plugin.
You need to disabled the oembed headers with this plugin (this has no side effects): https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-embeds/
After that you can force a fresh link preview by appending a ?1 as some of you guys already pointed out!
I hope that fixes your problem.
I wrote a detailed explanation for the problem here: https://pmig.at/2017/10/26/linkedin-link-preview-for-wordpress/
Linkedin caches the urls so it's very practical to make sure that this is not your problem before starting to debug.
This might tool then might come in handy: https://www.linkedin.com/post-inspector/inspect/
Here you can preview your url and see how it looks like when sharing. It refreshes the caching as well so you can be sure if you have a problem or if it was the caching only.
After a long trial and error I found out that my .htaccess was somehow blocking the Linkedin robot (wordpress site). For those who use the ithemes security plugin for wordpress or another security plugin make sure that LinkedIn is not blocked.
Make sure there is no line like:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Link [NC,OR]
The easiest way to check is to use wordpress default htaccess lines.
As mentioned before, make sure you don't retry cached pages in linkedin.
You can try this only once a week!
I had a link to my site and I wanted to customize the image Linkedin displayed. So I added open graph tags which didn't seem to render at all. Until I read this:
The first time that LinkedIn's crawlers visit a webpage when asked to share content via a URL, the data it finds (Open Graph values or our own analysis) will be cached for a period of approximately 7 days.
This means that if you subsequently change the article's description, upload a new image, fix a typo in the title, etc., you will not see the change represented during any subsequent attempts to share the page until the cache has expired and the crawler is forced to revisit the page to retrieve fresh content.
https://developer.linkedin.com/docs/share-on-linkedin
The solution for me was to add a hashbang. I am on an ajax style application which doesn't render the whole page, I think linkedin has a bit of a hissy fit about the text/image not being on the page on initial scrape, adding
%23!
to the end of my encoded url or
#!
to the unencoded url before sending it off to linkedin seemed to do the trick nicely for my share button popup. Not wsure if this is only Ajax/js apps or not but it certainly solved a couple of hours of effort for me.
I guess this is only useful if your application is setup to handle the escape_fragment in the url and render a static page not a dynamic one but I can't test this theory right now
This was happening on one of my client's sites as well. I discovered that the .htaccess file was blocking the site from LinkedIn if the user-agents contained the string "jakarta".
As soon as I remove this filtering, LinkedIn was able to access all of the required the OpenGraph (og) information when the client would post a link.
True, the documentation states that you can have: title, url, description, and image. But in reality, you have two options. Pick one of the two following sets and use it, as you have no other choice...
Set 1 Options
og:title
og:url
og:image
Set 2 Options
og:title
og:url
og:description
That is the reason why og:description is mysteriously missing from preview links. But if you drop image, then your description will finally display.
Try it: Wikipedia has an og description but no og image, while GitHub has both. Share Wikipedia and Share GitHub. Clearly seems like either you get a choice to display description or a choice to display image. I have spent weeks struggling with LinkedIn Support to correct this, but to no avail.
If I insert in my wall a link like this:
http://blog.bonsai.tv/news/il-nuovo-vezzo-della-lega-nord-favorire-i-lombardi-alluniversita/
then facebook extract the image in the post and not the first image in the webpage ( not image logo or other little images for example ) !!
How facebook does that ?
Hm, impossible to say without more information about the algorithm they use.
However, from looking at the page's source code you can see that while the image of Bossi is not the first image in the page, it's the first inside the divs "page_content" and "post_content". Maybe Facebooks knows the HTML IDs that the blogging system (Wordpress in this case) uses, and uses these to find the first image that is actually part of the page content.
That would actually be a good idea, and is essentially an implementation of the "semantic web"...
As others have said, we have no idea how Facebook decides what to choose in the absence of any relevant metadata (though Sleske's guesses seem reasonable; I'd also guess that they look at the first big image), but you can avoid that by going the correct route and simply giving facebook (and similar services) addiotnal metadata about your page by using Open Graph Protocol tags, for example if you want to specify a particular image to use for a facebook like, you'd include this in your head tag:
<meta property="og:image" content="<your image URL>" />
OGP is also used by LinkedIn, Google+ and many others.
If you're in Wordpress you can control these tags with an open graph plugin. Other systems can do it manually or via their own plugins.
I can imagine that the Facebook crawler can identify the actual content part, and select an image from it. Similar functionality is used by the Safari Reader functionality. It probably helps that the software used is Wordpress, which is the most popular blogging software. It's a quick win for Facebook to add specific support for this software.
My guess is facebook has built some algorithms for distinguishing the actual content from the other data in a html page. When looking at the page you provided it's quite easy since the html element that contains the page content has id="page_content" which is self-explanatory.