Have you ever shared a link on Facebook except, it doesn't look right? There is no picture and the description does not seem to match what the page is about. I know when this happens to me, I just cancel the share because, well it is no longer easy for me to share and odds are I don’t care enough to go through a hassle to share an interesting article or whatever. The funny thing is it happens to me a lot when sharing temporary pages from really big marketing campaigns like contest pages or rewards programs and you would think the big guys would get it right!
The main reasons this happens? The open graph tags and basic SEO are not set up properly so Facebook is pulling the only information it can find on the page. After one share on Facebook the link information is cached on Facebook and will stay the same even if you update your site information, unless you request it to changed.
I read a great article on Moz.com yesterday that had lots of good general SEO information on leveraging social media and had a section all about this subject. This section of the article starts with a large Nutella ad and has great examples screenshots and links to a detailed article on how add open graph tags and a link to the Facebook Debugger tool (which will look for new info on your site). Here is the complete article:
http://moz.com/blog/seo-and-community-like-peanut-butter-jelly
Now many people think (including myself) that a lot of this extra coding can be avoided on blogs and smaller websites by taking the time to do the little things you should be doing for SEO purposes anyway, like a search or meta description for each and every blog post and new content added. Have you ever had this issue with your website or seen other companies links do this? What's your opinion?
