12 March 2012

Facebook is not blocking Blogger; it just expects Open Graph markup

These past days a saw a couple of people complaining on that posting links on doesn’t show the nice rich preview we are all used to seeing. There was also a report that Blogger links were marked as spam and required word verification to post. While that issue seems to be fixed in the mean time, the previews are still missing. And now that I think about it, it must have started much longer ago, since I noticed it days ago on some links automatically posted to my profile by ifttt.

But on the other hand, my own blog doesn’t have this problem! I could think of only one difference between the two, that is I had implemented the Facebook Open Graph markup about two years ago – as I have detailed back then in two different articles – and the other blog(s) didn’t. I checked this empirically with Jesse Stay’s website – which certainly has the markup as well – and, sure enough, Facebook generates previews for it just fine.

Facebook previews for Bloggerlinks with Open GraphFacebook previews for Bloggerlinks without Open Graph

It looks like Facebook is starting to push the Open Graph markup more aggressively, through a, not so subtle, “incentive” (shall we say) for bloggers and website owners to play by Facebook’s rules on the web. While that can add some structure, some much needed semantics to sites, the primary benefactor for the foreseeable future remains Facebook, since it’s about the only place where this new markup can be accessed in a practical way by users. It will be interesting to see if this requirement will extend from Blogger blogs to other sites and domains or if it’s simply a low blow against .

15 comments:

  1. Of note, I've also had issues getting Google+ to recognize Blogger blogs as well. For Google+, you have to implement micro-formats to get it to be recognized correctly. In the end, Blogger just kind of sucks at recognizing meta data about posts on their blogs.

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    1. I didn't see any issues on Google+, but then again I'm posting very rarely there.

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  2. OK... interesting. But how can you adapt dynamic views when there's no ability to edit .html?

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    1. Good question... I'm not sure you can; then again the Open Graph markup is added in the head of the template, it's applied globally to the page, not to some html element. I'll try it out and will get back to you if there is a solution.

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    2. I have just checked, you can add the Open Graph markup to dynamic templates, there is no difference in that regard to the previous template format.
      However, like you mentioned in another comment, if the domain gets redirected to another country, Facebook stops generating the previews for shared links. The same thing is happening with links to my blog when I change the domain. I guess Facebook doesn't detect the canonical URL of the page; unfortunately I can't see what we as site/blog owners can do in this situation...

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  3. Thanks for this. I've tried this by applying my own template, but that's not working. Having glanced across a number of blogs I read, some link and some don't, but all are lacking the Open Graph protocol.

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  4. Sorry to bombard... I note that my main URL http://entartetemusik.blogspot.co.uk/ is fine on Facebook, but that individual posts eg. http://entartetemusik.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/swallowed-glory.html are not. Should I place Open Graph details within the coding for each story?

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    1. You can check out my previous articles about integrating the markup in Blogger, they should still be relevant:
      - Prepare your blog for the Facebook, err, Social Era;
      - Open Graph markup for Blogger [updated].
      I'm planning a small update anyway, but that should help you get started, assuming you can edit the head section of the template for dynamic views. The second one should be what you need, if shows how to generate different markup for the home page and the individual articles. I guess Facebook has a hard time detecting the content of the page and that should help.

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  5. Thanks for this. Very helpful, but Blogger rejects that coding in individual posts. I've noted, however, that blogspot.co.uk links are not linked by Facebook, but that blogspot.com links are.

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    1. Then it could have something to do with the new redirection to a country-specific URL. Facebook probably assumes everything other than blogspot.com is spam-related or something. In that case I'm not sure if the Open Graph markup will help...

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  6. i want facebook to share post on my blogspot post / page with particular image which i want it appears when people share my post, no need to select which image should be shared. how to do that?

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    1. I was meaning to write an article about that for some time now...
      Basically you cannot choose an image per post; on the other hand Blogger assigns a thumbnail to each post automatically (if it has one or more images) and you can use that thumbnail in the Facebook OpenGraph code. Add this code in the head section of the blog template:
      < meta expr:content='data:blog.postImageThumbnailUrl' property='og:image'/ >

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  7. OK... interesting. But how can you adapt dynamic views when there's no ability to edit .html?

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    1. Well, since these are implemented with meta tags we can still add Open Graph markup to Blogger dynamic templates.

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  8. Every week I share my blogger post using a mapped sub-domain on Facebook, every week I have to use code verification and every week I fill out Facebooks error report, my article is posted but if you click on it Facebook than gives a "something went wrong error" and ask if you trust this site. Its just bad business.

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