Fix Facebook Share’s previews of links to your site with the “URL Linter”

So you’re sharing a link on Facebook — or monitoring Facebook Share links to your website that other FB users have posted — and you notice that Link Preview has plotzed: no page title, no link description, no image. Just a raw URL.

Not real attractive or compelling, and — especially with regards to links shared to your site — you want your stuff to look good as it streams down the newsfeed. What to do?

Well, an NRDC blogger ran into this problem this morning, NRDC Internet Director Will Tam solved it lickety-split, and I feel compelled to share his very useful tip:

There is a tool that clears out these bad preview info. The trouble is that Facebook heavily caches things. If you try to share a post and the post isn’t published yet, or if the server is being slow to respond, or Facebook is having their own issues, you’ll run into this.

Here’s how you fix it when you do run into it — BOOKMARK THIS LINK:

http://developers.facebook.com/tools/lint/

You visit that link, paste in the URL of the post you want to share, and hit submit. It will/should return the info you want, and clear out Facebook’s cache. Then, when you go back to ‘share’ the page via Facebook, it should be all better.

Danke schoen, Will.

(update: Did you know Facebook Share’s link-description field is editable? On mouseover of the description, click and you get a nice AJAX editable text field. Not sure how long this has been implemented but I noticed in the last month or two and have been finding it useful — text the Share tool pulls in automagically can be too long, or the lede may be buried, etc. It’s nice to be able to manually pull in a key quote.)

October 14, 2010 | Filed Under the social web, Tips and Tutorials