Facebook shows Topic permalink, and not post / reply content...

[mywaytoo]

Harvey... It seems to me that FB are doing the logical thing...

I linked to  http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/travel-and-living-abroad/travel-advice-by-country/middle-east-north-africa/egypt ... which has the page name of 'Egypt travel advice'.

FB linked to 'Egypt travel advice', ie. my link as above, whilst also displaying a link to the Home page of that website (Don't know why they displayed the Home page...).

So far this is what happens with my Nabble forum reply...
http://nabble-support.1.n2.nabble.com/Facebook-shows-Topic-permalink-and-not-post-reply-content-tp6908386p6983870.html

The FB text appears to be from the meta name description given in their source code... The source code for this page shows 2 meta names... "DC.description" and "description", which both have the same content...

The Nabble text is from the content of the original text... Oh... I was testing that in case it was coming from the title or meta tags... I was hoping that FB shuffle through any subsequent changes, but I cannot rely on this, and likely they don't anyway, or do they??? Like people/websites/forums do with our profile photos? I'll check this now.

I have posted a question about this on FB's page... but I doubt that they will even get to see it along with all the other questions... and spam...

EDIT: The description is coming from my Nabble meta tag description on the original post, labelled TESTING DESCRIPTION... https://www.facebook.com/pages/knit4dolls/122061844540680

Ooooh... so is the title / page name, labelled TESTING TITLE...

So Nabble's data isn't from the same places as my other link...

EDIT AGAIN: IMO Nabble must bring back the meta tags for replies to original posts...

[Peter <Nabble>]

You are thinking about individual posts but you must not forget that it's also a web page and pages shouldn't contain multiple description tags, for instance.
If you think about what a search engine crawler would do, your page would probably be considered malformed.

I think Harvey's approach to change the text is the best alternative.

[mywaytoo]

Peter... To manually change the text for FB would mean altering the title and description meta tags for the original post, posting onto FB, and then changing the tags back again... Ummm... Not really 21st century technology.

How does Google cope with a page without its own meta tags? If it copes like FB then the page will have duplicates anyway as it would be picking up the title and description of the original post.

I did suggest a while ago a way of identifying each page as unique by using the first phrase / sentence of the reply for the title / description...

[Peter <Nabble>]

I'm not a FB heavy user but I thought I read Harvey saying that you can change it directly of FB with a single click.

[mywaytoo]

Not FB... and it was touch and go anyway... http://nabble-support.1.n2.nabble.com/Facebook-shows-Topic-permalink-and-not-post-reply-content-tp6908386p7015278.html

[Peter <Nabble>]

Harvey44 wrote

IF (big IF) I am understanding this right you are wondering why FB doesn't automatically populate your post with the content from the link you are posting.

If that is what you are wondering, it has always been a problem for me on both my google blog and the forum. Sometimes you get what you want and sometimes you don't.

I recently learned that if you click on the text that is populated you can CHANGE it.  Now I just accept it and populate that field manually. It's a pain but it works.

IF on the other hand I have misunderstood the point of this post please ignore me.

If I understood it right he says that there is a way to do it and it didn't sound that hard. To be honest, I'm not a hardcore FB user so I'm not sure about what he is talking about.

[mywaytoo]

Peter... Harvey says... "If that is what you are wondering, it has always been a problem for me on both my google blog and the forum. Sometimes you get what you want and sometimes you don't. "

It seems to me that he is talking about his Google blog and his Nabble forum... NOT Facebook!

[DavidJCobb]

mywaytoo wrote

Peter... Harvey says... "If that is what you are wondering, it has always been a problem for me on both my google blog and the forum. Sometimes you get what you want and sometimes you don't. "

It seems to me that he is talking about his Google blog and his Nabble forum... NOT Facebook!

I think he was talking about using Facebook to link to the blog and forum... And he's right: when you paste the URL into Facebook and it loads the title and description, you can usually click right on the title (or description) and it morphs into a textbox that you can edit. Change the text however you wish, and then hit "Enter" to accept the changes. This works for almost every website, including Nabble forums.



This isn't a perfect solution, but if you or your forum members only occasionally need to post links on Facebook, it could be useful enough.

[mywaytoo]

Sorry guys... I misunderstood Harvey's comment...

This works great for me... I want to use it for explicit SEO... I'll let you know if it works...  

Thanks again.  Oh... here is the preferred version...  

[Harvey]

Wait, wait, wait....

Did I help?



BTW I DIG Action Man with that kung fu action!

[mywaytoo]

Harvey... You helped! http://nabble-support.1.n2.nabble.com/Facebook-shows-Topic-permalink-and-not-post-reply-content-tp6908386p7015278.html

Perhaps too much 'off pist'...