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It seems the facebook debug tool http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug is using a cache.

I made an update to my site but facebook debug tool is still showing up the old data.

Is their any way to force facebook to refresh its data? It has been a few days now and it seems the cache will not expire.

bkaid
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user781623
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7 Answers7

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  1. Go to http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug
  2. Enter the URL following by fbrefresh=CAN_BE_ANYTHING

Examples:

  1. http://www.example.com?fbrefresh=CAN_BE_ANYTHING
  2. http://www.example.com?postid=1234&fbrefresh=CAN_BE_ANYTHING
  3. OR visit: http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object?q=http://www.example.com/?p=3568&fbrefresh=89127348912

I was having the same issue last night, and I got this solution from some website. I hope this helps.

P.C.
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    It seems like it doesn't work for images. To refresh og:image you need to change name (url) of the image. It happens because fb doesn't use this URL but downloads image to its own server, and refreshes it only when URL changes... – Karol Mar 30 '12 at 07:41
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    There is nothing special about `fbrefresh`. What you are actually doing is just changing the URL that gets requested -- it is treated as a new site. You can make any query string change for the same result. I believe this confusion stems from an example that was mentioned in the old FB blog back in early 2008. – AndrewF Dec 20 '12 at 14:08
  • Can we be sure, that FB isn't geo-caching? If I see the new page, how can I be certain that old page was purged from FB caches around the world? – Patrik Beck Sep 04 '15 at 06:50
  • So, the point being it CANT_BE_ANYTHING but rather NOT_SEEN_BEFORE ? – Andy Hayden Sep 19 '16 at 22:24
6

The tool should update Facebook's cache for a given URL immediately, if Facebook is still returning 'stale' data, check that Facebook is actually getting the content you're expecting.

A quick way to check is to load your page from a command line tool like curl, using Facebook's user agent and see if the meta tags returned are what you were expecting.

One thing i've seen happen sometimes is people including all the correct tags on page X, except that page X has an og:url meta tag pointing to another url, Y.

Facebook will follow that tag and scrape page Y and use that metadata. I've usually seen it where page X is 'something.com/article/x' and the og:url is set to 'something.com/articles/' or 'something.com'

Igy
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    How to update og:image? We need to update images frequently during development. Renaming images each time is not a way, its too cumbersome. We also tried to POST /?id=...&scrape=true, but this approach not working for images. What is a "right" way today? Thank you – Petr Sep 10 '15 at 10:51
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    I solved it with adding ?t=TIMESTAMP to my image url in php script, where we generate tags. For now it works. – Petr Sep 10 '15 at 12:52
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I've the same problem. The ?fbrefresh=CAN_BE_ANYTHING didn't do anything clear the og:image cache.

The only solution that worked for me was to rename the image and the path on the og metaga. You can do something like:

<meta property="og:image" content="http://yourdomain.com/images/socia-photo-v2.jpg">

If somebody knows a better solution will be very appreciate.

Thanks.

Juan Pujol
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This hasn't been added to in a couple of years, but I've just had the same issue and found a way that immediately resolved it.

Facebook say:

Use og:image:width and og:image:height Open Graph tags Using these tags will specify the image to the crawler so that it can render it immediately without having to asynchronously.

Putting this into use should look like this:

<meta property="og:image:width" content="1200" />
<meta property="og:image:height" content="630" />

Solved the problem straight away! Hope this helps!

h3pl
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Go To https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/

then put site URL

Now Click on button Scrape Again

Sandeep Sherpur
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0

I was getting the cache to show the right picture after updating my blog post, but when I went to post the link, Facebook was still showing an old picture. I didn't want to wait a day to see if it would finally change, so I did what's outlined on this page:

https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/18468/adding-meta-tags-to-individual-blogger-posts

In other words, something like this:

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == "http://urlofyourpost.com"'>
  <meta content='http://urlofyourimage.png' property='og:image'/>
 </b:if>

Basically, you're going to hard code an if statement into your page's HTML to get it to change the meta content for whatever you've changed for that one post. It's a messy solution, but it works.

Community
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Michelle Glauser
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You can try the object debugger and click on fetch new scrape information. It is mainly to debug the open graph meta data.

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object/

user3012760
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