Featured Image with Facebook Sharing

I’m having a problem on my site with trying to share articles to facebook. Instead of using the featured image, it is grabbing images from the side bar. This is a real problem for this site. Can you please help?

http://www.billjohnsondetroit.com

It’s an issue with how Facebook sometimes ‘scrapes’ content from your site, and more often when the “featured” image is outside of the actual “post” area. It’s a known issue, with FB, and comes and goes. It’s not specifically theme related. Meaning, they don’t always read the OG image tag like it’s supposed to.

are there any recommendations or anything that I can do? My client is freaking out over this. Anything that you can do to help is much appreciated.

Thank you,

Rod . . .

Facebook just works that way as their bot gets overloaded; or your server is blocking them, or any of a number of things. I deal with this issue every day; in fact today, to post two news items to our page, I had to manually copy the headline, first paragraph, and manually upload the photo from my PC to get a proper post on Facebook for a new item. Stupid. And all the og tags are in place, right down to advanced tags like image format, height, width and optional https link to image. Still, hit or miss. And this happens with our custom site, Woo Canvas, Newspaper, and another theme. All somewhat randomly.

Suggestion: try to submit item later. Or, if in panic, do the post manually as I did.

Downside to a ‘free’ service like Facebook, there is nobody to complain to our get support from on their end. It’s basically haphazard.

Right now, one page is causing 502 error according to their debug tool… but every other social media site works, even LinkedIn and Stumbleupon, Pinterest, Twitter card with large image support, etc.

Just let your client know it’s nothing to do with the site. Both Google + and Facebook both have intermittent issues of “grabbing” the content due to how busy their servers are (basically the “fetch” is timing out in some way); or in some cases your hosting provider’s CSF/firewall has blocked Facebook for “port scanning” (FB scans your server port for Geolocation on every post to try to locate where your server is; if you do a lot of posts, eventually, your server blocks them for doing this with 30 different IP addresses; and you have to clear the CSF temp block rules to get the stupid FB bot to again be able to read your site!). Stuff like that!

Try this link from Facebook, enter your post page URL in box,
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/

if you get “502” error, it may be the firewall blocking issue, and you’d likely want to contact your web hosting co. about that.

We have to unblock our CSF temp files manually about once a month for stupid FB port scans!

Additional FB tools
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/

• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.

Ive found the same thing recently. Never used to be an issue. I have found a workaround by using the Yoast SEO plugin and directly uploading an image for each post under the social media sharing tab.

I used to have that problem. I installed this plugin, which is old but still works perfectly fine (as recently as yesterday): https://wordpress.org/plugins/easy-facebook-share-thumbnails/

Stupid thing about it, is the og tags are expressly there for Facebook to be able to grab the image.

Worth mentioning you need to ensure your robots.txt file isn’t blocking the /uploads/ folder or other folder if you renamed yours (I renamed mine as I hate “uploads”).

Is there a way to force facebook to dump its cache and pick up my site now that I have SEO activated?

(I just recommended that plugin since it fixes the problem for me (and I do use Yoast). :p But if it doesn’t work for the OP then my apologies!)

Thanks Lucian,

I’ll give that a try