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Our CMS uses permalink, for example this one:

www.kingmagazine.se/artiklar/king-kroner/20120713/10-korthallare

When a user is trying to share this URL by pasting it into the "update status" field on their Facebook homepage, Facebook seems to try fetch a different URL to get the open graph info, as illustrated in this image:

https://i.stack.imgur.com/MSOMx.png

The page fetched seems to be an error message from the site. The image is not relevant to the article specified but rather contained in the footer of all pages.

However the CMS also has internal URL:s, such as this one (for the same article):

www.kingmagazine.se/artiklar/?id=152539

When sharing that one on Facebook, the correct data is fetched, as illustrated here:

https://i.stack.imgur.com/E63qF.png

I have tried digging in our server logs to no avail - it seems like Facebook is requesting the wrong URL and not the complete permalink. I have also tried the Facebook Lint but haven't found any reason.

Has anyone got any ideas?

Sorry for the garbled links but Stackoverflow spam prevention said max 2 links and no images. :(

John Severinson
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  • Sorry, can’t reproduce your problem. Pasting the first URL you mentioned into the status box leads to the URL’s data being fetched apparently totally correct, no error to see anywhere. – CBroe Jul 13 '12 at 17:36

1 Answers1

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Just wanted to get back to this question if anyone else has the same problem, as we eventually found the solution.

The reason of the faulty information on Facebook was that the editors in the CMS had a preview function which showed the article as rendered to the visitor. These pages (as they included the site header/footer) also contained Facebook like buttons through the Facebook social plugin.

This meant that Facebook was 'pinged' of the article before it was actually published as the editor was previewing the changes. When Facebook tried to fetch the article, an error message (with an incorrect HTTP status code I might add) was returned which Facebook then cached.

Silly enough. :)

John Severinson
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