Open Graph Meta Data Blocked on FB

Hello,

As of May 6th all my FB posts disappeared from FB and my site no longer links to FB at all. Hundreds of dollars, as well as thousands of global connections and conversations literally vanished. I think I have some information that may be helpful, and I’m wondering if you can look into this and provide some additional advice.

I recently contacted Jetpack and they provided some excellent feedback. May I kindly ask that you look into this email and make any necessary suggestions? Please note that I have been consistently using Yoast SEO, and I am not on a CDN. I am on VPS. Would it be appropriate to be concerned about Visual Composer at this juncture? My question is, what would suddenly be causing my Open Graph meta data to do this? Everything was fine until all the WP updates were done simultaneously at the end of April in response to the HUGE security issues.

Please take a look. Jetpack’s email is as follows:

Hi Erin:

> Thank you for the email. I have followed the steps you outlined
> meticulously, and there has been no change whatsoever.

Thank you for confirming those steps!

> I cannot share to Facebook from my website at all. Also, every sponsored ad
> has disappeared from my Facebook page. In fact, it’s nowhere to be found on
> Facebook at all. They have entirely vanished. My posts, along with hundreds
> of thousands of likes, shares and conversations have completely vanished. I
> was lucky enough to speak with someone from Facebook in their sales dept
> regarding ads. They assured me I was not blocked and notified me that
> sponsored posts have been ‘disappearing’ from people’s pages. They said it
> was a ‘bug’ yet they have no idea when it will be fixed.
>
> I’ve heard nothing more despite promises to contact me.

I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do to help with the posts on Facebook disappearing. However, I did find some information that may be useful (see below).

> Please do take a closer look. I’ve been looking at the URL upon clicking
> the FB share icons on my website. Would these lend any insight?
>
> My theme support has assured me the problem is on FB’s end. That may be
> true. However, I still cannot share or post from my site, which makes no
> sense. FB seems completely disconnected, as post counts are not showing
> either, although I type a URL for my posts in my status field.

I checked out the sharing function and got the same error. When you share a post on Facebook, or when Jetpack Publicize publishes a post to your Facebook page, Facebook crawls the page and looks for Open Graph meta tags in the head to build a complete post preview (with an image, title, description, …).

You can see what Facebook sees by entering one of your posts’ URLs in Facebook Debugger:
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug

I took this post for the troubleshooting: http://thewordsmithblog.com/mary-martha-syndrome-living-in-marthas-world-with-marys-heart/

Checking it in Facebook’s debugger give me the error of “Failed to get composer template data.” – (screenshot) http://d.pr/i/5MP3

Doing a bit of Google research, that error indicates that Facebook is blocking “something” on your site – which would explain why you can’t connect via Publicize or why sharing your posts isn’t working.

The Graph API link in the screenshot above is here: https://graph.facebook.com/883611921699800

As you can see, you have an excessive amount of data in your og:description meta tag. Facebook recommends a limit of 200-300 characters for that meta tag – clearly there’s more than that here.

Facebook also has automated tools to prevent spamming of their API (which is how Publicize publishes your posts to Facebook) – my theory is they blocked your domain from Facebook due to the over-character limit in your og:description that is generated with each post.

If you look at the source code for the post I used in testing, you can see this extraneous code being inserted at line 159. That code is not being inserted by Jetpack or Yoast SEO (which is loading the meta tags at line 32).

What you need to do is find where that extra og:meta tag code is being added (whether it’s within your theme or a third plugin) and delete/disable it. Then, I recommend using Yoast for your Facebook meta tags in addition to the Twitter tags you’re using now.

Then, I would contact Facebook again with the information I provided you, because they are blocking your domain somehow – whether it’s in their automated API spam checks or otherwise – but it’s definitely on their end.

> FYI: Google posts are not counting either.

I’m sorry I missed this question initially. Regarding Google+, the only share counts that Jetpack will display with the icon only or icon+text buttons are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. We have a current GitHub issue to add the Google+ functionality to Jetpack, but we have no estimated date as to when this will be added. You can follow along the progress here:
https://github.com/Automattic/jetpack/issues/584

I hope that helps! Sorry there’s not more I can do with regards to the Facebook problem, but let us know if you still have trouble with Jetpack once they sort out your issue. You’ll know whether or not they fixed when the sharing button works for your site again.

Best of luck,

Carolyn S.
Happiness Engineer | Automattic
Jetpack | Guided Transfer

Thank you for your excellent support! I look forward to hearing from you soon!

Kindest Regards,
Erin Pavlicek
appointedtime.org