Question from Manuel O.: I have a blog with a sticky post that I update every day with a few news headlines and a new photo.
The page’s URL is the only thing that stays the same.
When I try to share the updated post on Facebook it always shows the old version of the post instead of the new one. Why is this happening?
Rick’s answer: Hi Manuel. In order to speed things up, Facebook stores a “cached” copy of the post snippet whenever you share a link on your page. Then when you try to share the same link again, it automatically pulls up the cached snippet instead of generating a new one.
This is actually a good thing because it keeps Facebook running efficiently by not having to fetch a new snippet every time one of the billions of links that are shared on the site every day is re-shared. That being said, it causes a problem when a previously shared post is changed, and then shared again.
Luckily, you can easily force Facebook to delete the cached copy of a page snippet and fetch a new one from the website by using the Facebook Debugger tool. Here’s how:
1 – Visit the web page you wish to share on Facebook and copy the URL from the browser’s address bar to the clipboard (highlight the URL, then right-click on it and click Copy).
2 – Click this link to load the Facebook Debugger. Note: You’ll need to sign into your Facebook account if you aren’t logged in already.
3 – Paste the URL of the page you wish to share into the text box, then click the Debug button. A new page will be displayed showing a ton of information about Facebook’s currently cached version of your blog post.
4 – Click the Scrape Again button. That will force Facebook to revisit that page on your blog and place an updated version of it in their cache.
5 – Click the Scrape Again button two or three more times to make sure the entire post has been re-scraped. (For whatever reason it sometimes take a few clicks to completely finish the job.)
6 – Go back to your Facebook page or Timeline and share the link as you normally would. The snippet should now reflect the new version of the shared page.
I hope this helps Manuel. Good luck!
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