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(This post isn't a duplicate of an existing question)

We recently switched our website from ‘http’ to ‘https/ssl’. We use a WordPress plugin that displays a floating share bar. On that bar there is a Facebook ‘likes’ counter.

After switching to https, we lost all our Facebook likes count.

We would like to get back all the likes we had!

Here is a PDF file that describes the problem in detail: https://www.dropbox.com/s/p7tpqsi7swg1n6l/Problem_explanation_2.pdf?dl=1

I have read and tried all the tips from similar post present on Stackoverflow and other websites.

I've hired a guy on Upwork and here is what he found:

"We have been in contact with Facebook's developers and it seems this change will be permanent. Unfortunately there is nothing we can do as they have decided to treat redirected URLs differently, thus erasing the former social proof when one domain is redirected to another. I do apologize for this - we had no idea this change was coming and did not expect the Facebook team to deny our request to change it back to the way it worked before."

I have two questions:

  1. Does Facebook have really erased the previous FB likes counts? (of the HTTP website)
  2. If not, how can I recover those likes?

I find it hash to lost those likes, there are thousands of websites out there who can't switch to HTTPS because FB isn't able to treat redirected URLs.

Community
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Evos
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1 Answers1

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As annoying as it is Facebook does treat http:// vs https:// as two completely different pages for some unknown reason. That said the old likes are still there only you would have to revert your site back to the http version or use a little hack.

Like button like this:

<div class="fb-like" data-href="https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/" data-layout="standard" data-action="like" data-show-faces="true" data-share="true"></div>

if you change data-href in this example - you will change URL for liking and counter can be saved. So you can implement this technique and wait for Facebook to catch up with Google.

Brandon Orndorff
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  • They are completely different URLs, there's a very common pattern of serving the same content on the HTTP/HTTPS 'version' of a URL, but that's not necessarily true – Igy Jan 05 '17 at 11:13
  • @Brandon @Igy Thank you for your time and your suggestions. I've already tried your little hack: The permalinks or all post are now in https, so we edited the Wordpress plugin in order to withdraw the ‘s’ character from the permalink. Instead of having: inline `
     – Evos Jan 05 '17 at 20:28
  • Your HTTP URLs of course need to be still available for the FB scraper. You must serve the relevant OG meta data when that HTTP URL is requested - and not redirect to HTTPS automatically. – CBroe Jan 09 '17 at 12:10
  • @CBroe Thank you for your reply. So you're saying I should not not change data-href, and rather serve the relevant OG meta data. Can you tell me more about this please ? Thank you so much in advance – Evos Jan 10 '17 at 10:39
  • The accepted answer in the duplicate explains it in more detail. Plus, https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/faqs#faq_1149655968420144 – CBroe Jan 10 '17 at 10:41