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I have a site that has GeoIP redirect rules attached to it. So if the user is in USA and tries to view the Canadian version of the website, we would redirect them to the Canadian version. Each locale would have its own version of content and language (ie - our Taiwan site only has Chinese, whereas our Canadian site supports English and French).

My problem is that when a user Likes our Canadian site, Facebook scrapes our American locale. Similarly, this happens to other locales such as Britain. Are all the Facebook scraping servers located in America? Is there any way to fix this?

Jon
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  • To prevent Facebook from scraper from geo-ip-ed and scraping the incorrect site. – Jon Sep 04 '13 at 17:26

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Use Facebook's Debug Tool to see what meta tags you're returning to Facebook, and stop redirecting Facebook's crawler to the USA page; just let it access whichever geography-specific site it asked for and give it the meta tags which describe that site

Igy
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  • I've been using Facebook's Debug Tool to determine that all locales are re-directed to USA. I don't think we are redirecting FB's crawlers to USA on purpose. Do you know if their crawlers are in America? – Jon Sep 03 '13 at 23:56
  • Not necessarily, but most are - in your case you should probably use the User Agent header and (if security is a concern) a check that the IP is owned by Facebook - methods for checking the IP are in this document: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/ApplicationSecurity/ – Igy Sep 04 '13 at 00:40
  • Can I also use Facebook User Agent somehow to prevent re-directs? If so, how would I use it? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8626812/how-to-recognize-facebook-user-agent – Jon Sep 04 '13 at 20:58
  • The question you linked shows the user-agent string the Facebook crawler users - how you use that information to respond to the request from the crawler is entirely up to your server / app / routing configuration - you basically need to not-redirect the crawler – Igy Sep 04 '13 at 21:19