: Facebot sometimes fails to parse open graph meta data, causing share failure We maintain a WordPress-based website where Yoast plugin takes care of Open Graph meta tags generation. Recently we

Posted in: #Facebook #MetaTags #OpenGraphProtocol #Sharing #WebCrawlers

We maintain a WordPress-based website where Yoast plugin takes care of Open Graph meta tags generation.
Recently we had a problem with likes disappearing after domain / protocol migration, but we have managed to solve it: developers.facebook.com/bugs/400115027024513/
Suddenly our customer started reporting problems related to article sharing. It occurred only to newly published articles (actually our customer shares all the articles on his FB page right after publication). I have never managed to reproduce those issues on my computer, but fortunately my customer did some screen-shots and has even managed to reproduce the problem in FB Sharing Debugger.

ISSUE #1

The first issue is somehow related to redirects Facebot (?) is subjected to (which from our tests should never occur, because we have user-agent-based rules which allow Facebot to visit "canonical"/original versions of all the articles without being redirected to new domain/https version of the website)

The translation of error messages above from German language:

"error while parsing input url, no data was scraped or saved to clipboard
crawler recognizes following as redirect:   mark a mark of   the url we tried to use to extract meta data is shown bold
so they tried to extract from HTTP version"

ISSUE #2

On our website we in addition to Open Graph meta tags there is also a valid FB app id tag. FB app has been created on FB developers console using the default domain (without any protocol) - acme.de
Somehow that app ID is not correct according to Facebot, but only in some cases. Sharing Debugger reports the following error (its content has been translated from German language too):

"The App-ID (148188879xxxxxx) in meta tage "fb:app_id" is not valid. If this URL is shared on FB the standard App-ID (966242223397117) will be used / assigned."

TEMPORARY SOLUTION

Prior to this problems the sharing button on customer's website was using the old (deprecated?) sharer.php?u= method, which as far as I know strongly relies on the OG metadata present on the page, so when the URL is shared for the first time Facebot fetches metadata in order to create a FB "card" containing the image, the title + description and the URL of the article. For some odd reason from time to time Facebot fails to do so and my customer is experiencing problems while trying to share a newly published article.

In order to exclude those Facebot-related problems I have switched from
www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=<URL>

to
www.facebook.com/dialog/feed?app_id=<APP ID>&display=popup&caption=<TITLE>&link=<URL>&picture=<IMG URL>

the method we usually use on other websites we maintain and for now it seems to work well, but we are worried about the fact that Facebot still fails to parse some pages and we might have some problems with FB like counter on some articles in the future.
Does anyone have any idea on what are those Facebot errors are about and how do we fix them?

UPDATE

Adding more screen-shots

German: This URL could not be posted, please try again later

The only error my customer encountered which had an error code