Have you ever posted a link to Facebook and wondered what the image and information associated with it is?
Whenever you post a link to Facebook what is essentially happening is a crawler goes to the domain name provided and “scrapes” the website you listed. The crawler gathers, caches, and displays information about the website such as its title, description, and thumbnail image.
How can you view what will be shown prior to you posting the URL/link?
You can use the Facebook Sharing Debugger to see the information that is used when your website content is shared on Facebook, Messenger and other places. The Batch Invalidator will let you refresh this information for multiple URLs at the same time. Open Graph markup lets you take control over how your website content appears to others.
How does this help me?
When building out a website it is important that you address what images and text are being shown when users share links to your site through social media. If you do not define the image or text, there is a chance you will get an undesired result such as incorrect information or even an incorrect image.
The Facebook Sharing Debugger allows you to not only view your content associated with your links but it allows you to scrape your site over and over until you achieve your desired results. Your results should reflect the content your users will see after clicking on the link you provided. Test it out by putting your website URL in and seeing what comes up? You may be surprised with what you find!
