My Site URL: http://www.droidgoblin.com
This is one issue that has plagued my site for months. As per the developers, it was fixed in the theme several versions ago. However it still doesn’t work for me.
Issue: When sharing posts on Google+, a very small and INCORRECT thumbnail comes up, along with just the post title.
Expected (Correct) Behavior: Post title, along with the correct BIG featured image and meta description/post extract should be displayed.
I tried disabling all plugins with no success. All caches cleared, CDN (previously PageSpeed, now Cloudflare) both disabled.
Switching themes, even to default WP themes fixes the issue, so I know it isn’t something on the server side. Sharing of posts on Facebook works perfectly well too.
Any help in this regard would be much appreciated.
Fact:
if you look at your meta tags and the correct image is listed for sharing in the OG tags, then Google will “normally” grab that image, most often this is your “featured” image.
Sometimes they don’t due to size of image, or inability to load that link, and will go for the first, largest image on the post that the bot can scan.
You can often try “fetch page as Google” from your webmaster tools to see what Google’s bot is “actually” seeing when it reads your page(s).
Because Google is dealing with billions of things every moment in time. Same reason sometimes they only get the headline and not the full description. Nothing to do with your site/theme/content. Google just is not very consistent with it. Well known issue with all social media. LinkedIn has problems saving to groups consistently, Facebook sometimes won’t grab the image, sometimes gives you a choice of image to use, etc.
Basically you don’t have 100% consistent control over anything Google pulls from your site dynamically when using a submit tool. If the meta data is all there, Google will grab it “most of the time” but not all the time.
There is endless discussion of this on the Google forums.
Upshot: if it’s mission critical, sometimes you have to manually submit the story from your /posts/ page in G+; manually paste in the description, paste in URL, hit space, then see what it grabs from there. We have to do this routinely on different sites, regardless of theme, CMS, or content. Unfortunately.
I understand that, but this doesn’t explain why Google starts picking it up correctly as soon as I shift to a different theme. But as soon as I revert to Newspaper, it goes back to being buggy.
I tried sharing using share plugins, even manually pasting the URL (pressing space and all) but the end result is the same, it simply doesn’t work.
Which is why I re-iterate that there’s something else at play here.
Well, been using the theme for 12 months now, and we don’t have the issue you refer to, beyond what I’ve already stated. We’ve seen random behavior using 10 different themes across 20 different websites since G+ launched.
So, it may be something unique to your setup, a plugin, java conflict, etc.
1) try checking for errors in Chrome (F12)
2) try “fetch as Google” from your webmaster tools account to see exactly what Google’s bot sees, along with any errors.
Not much else you can do.
I had the same problem of Nitish. I say “had” beacause I believe I solved it. But not at all.
I try to explain. Sorry for my english…
I tried to empty cache, to compare source page of my site with original Newspaper, uninstall all plugins, reinstall them, change theme setting, change theme and reintall it. Nothing to do! Sharing on G+ a disaster…
Thumbnails were little and wrong, right the title, without meta description.
I followed the conversation between Nitish and Chris, here, and between Nitish and administrator TagDiv on Themeforest comments. Same frustration for me.
Today I noticed that the number of Thumbnails sharing on G+ was 30 and they were taken from the categories of “mega menu”, not random, but in order of menu. So, if I had in my menu for ex. “art”, “fashion”, “funny”, “sport” and my menu is “Mega menu”, G+ thumbnail was taken from the thumbnail of mega menu preview, in order: art, fashion, etc). If I moved category in menu switching place, thumbnail changes. Interesting, I said!
Going on with my experiment, I noticed that removing mega menu with sub category, thumbnails were correct! I supposed the gap was here. Now I removed [category with subcategory] from mega menu. All is ok. Sharing on G+ is perfect: correct title, correct thumbnail and correct meta description!
But I’d like to solve the entire issue ’cause megamenu with sub category is the peculiarity of this theme.
holy sh**! You’re actually correct!
I disabled the mega-menu from my site, and the sharing seems to be working back again! Thank you so much!!
Short-term fix this may be, but at least something is better than nothing. Always knew there was some issue in the theme itself. Hope the developers can fix it soon enough.
