60 Second Solution: Facebook URL Debugger

Facebook has committed itself to improving the relevancy of information it provides in your News Feed so that you always receive the latest and most relevant information. While this is a good idea in theory, in practice it’s a bit more difficult. At well north of and estimated 200,000 servers (Facebook has always been tight-lipped about its infrastructure), making changes to information stored in its database isn’t always as instantaneous as you need it to be.

In order to serve information quickly, Facebook fetches information about a posted link – Title, URL, description and image – and stores it on its servers. That way, it doesn’t have to keep going out to the web site to retrieve that information, speeding up your user experience. Unless of course, you’ve gone ahead and changed any of that information.

Nothing is more frustrating than sharing a link from your web site on Facebook, only to see the outdated information staring back at you when you look at it in your News Feed on on your business’ page. Fortunately, Facebook has had a tool for developers that helps you reset Facebook’s version to your most recent content. The tool has been available for the past several years and they’ve made improvements to it, so it actually retrieves the latest version of your article, post or page. You can find the tool at:

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

By simply inputting the URL of your page or post, you can see what information Facebook has for your content. Then by clicking ‘Fetch New Scrape Information’, Facebook reaches out and downloads a fresh version of the content from that URL. You can use the tool to find out why images aren’t showing, meta information, Open Graph information and more.