Facebook unable to "preview" WordPress sites

[holdstrong]

Description: For several months now Facebook has had trouble previewing sites based on WordPress. When you attempt to share a link to a WordPress website, Facebook is unable to pull and preview the title of the page, the description of the page, or any images on the page. It just provides a link with the URL.

This was a sporadic problem that seemed to come and go earlier this year, but has now been consistently bugged for over a month.

As best as I can tell, this ONLY happens with WordPress based websites. Facebook is able to pull preview information on shared links with all other websites I've tried.

Steps to Reproduce: Log in to facebook profile and attempt to share a link from your personal profile or a page.

Reason it needs to be addressed: This is a big deal for anyone who promotes their WordPress website via Facebook.

Additional Information: I have reproduced this bug on multiple installs of different versions of WP, across different hosts, with different themes, with and without plugins.

Some people, including Facebook support, have suggested this is a problem with WordPress Meta tags or headers. I have been unable to confirm this.

[ryan]

​http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Facebook_Share/Specifying_Meta_Tags

[ryan]

Every blog should be have a <title>, which that page says is used if no meta is specified.

[holdstrong]

That Facebook wiki page has definitely made the rounds in relation to this issue.

Unfortunately, adding the suggested Meta Tags to a WordPress site does not solve the problem. At least it doesn't on any of my test sites. Also, the wiki states if a meta name "title" is not specified, it will resort to using the title in the <title> tags. However, it does not do that either.

Furthermore, a lack of these specific Meta Tags is not prohibiting other websites on other platforms from displaying preview material. I have an Expression Engine site that has none of the tags outlined in that wiki article, yet Facebook previews its content just fine.

[holdstrong]

Here is a link to a test blog using the default Kubrick theme.

​http://stuckinboston.com/blog/?p=2741

If I try to share that in facebook, it does not pull any of the information to show a preview. It only shows the text URL.

If I try this with any other non-Wordpress website, it seems to work.

[holdstrong]

Well, wouldn't you know - now it is back to working sporadically...

This strikes me as a Facebook problem, but again, it is only with WordPress based sites and the Meta tags that are, or are not, present seem to make no difference.

Beats me

[ocean90]

This strikes me as a Facebook problem

Yes, I had the problem with other sites (not only WordPress based sites) too. I have just made a few sample with WordPress pages, all have worked.

So closing as invalid as long as we find no WordPress bug.