When sharing a post on facebook, the Facebook opengraph OG:DESCRIPTION tag is getting filled full of badly formatted data scraped from the top of the page. This happens on the tagdiv newspaper demo too:
For example, when using the facebook buttons under the post:
http://demo.tagdiv.com/newspaper/strong-growth-and-engagement-across-our-community/
Facebook open
The og:title is correct “Strong growth and engagement | Newspaper”
the og:image is correct
the og:description is:
“Home Lifestyle Health & Diet Strong growth and engagement LifestyleHealth & DietJul 23, 20130 9560 All right. Well, take care yourself. I guess that’s what you’re best, presence old master? A tremor in the Force. The last time felt it was in the presence of my old master. I have traced the Rebel spi…”
Ideally this facebook og:description should take the extract from the start of the post, after stripping it of any html/script.
Thanks
Craig
If you look at the page source on the demo page you reference, there is no og:tag for description on the page; Facebook is pulling that off the page, unless I’m mistaken.
You control og tags for social media using a plugin like YOAST SEO, which allows you to setup how you want snippets for OG tags to be populated. Often this defaults from the “excerpt” box on the page, which is how we do it here, as it allows us to create a better snippet for both SERPS and social media.
The theme doesn’t create OG description tags, so obviously you need to use the recommended plugins like YOAST SEO or comparable to create the social media meta tags you want to be found in both SERPS and for social media.
Looking at the “page source” is often the best way to understand WHAT is actually on the page and available for social media to scrape.
Hey, many thanks for this. I have Yoast and working out the best way to set Facebook and overall SEO up now.
Changes didn’t appear for me until I resubmitted the page to Facebook developer debug to refresh the sharing link
