If you write or contribute to a blog, you will probably want readers to be able to share your posts on Facebook. You can easily share the posts on a WordPress blog by installing a plug-in.
I recently ran into a problem with the link descriptions that display when a WordPress link is shared on Facebook. When I tried sharing a link on Facebook, I noticed that the text in the shared link was not correct. Note below how the post title, date, and author have been added to the beginning of the link description for Facebook.
I initially thought that there was an error with the WordPress theme, but I did a test and the problem showed up in other themes also. After doing research, I was able to find a solution so I thought I would share it with you. The solution involved first adding meta descriptions and titles to each post, and also using the Facebook debugger for posts that were still showing the problem despite the addition of the meta description.
Add meta descriptions to your posts
There are different plug-ins that you can use to add meta descriptions to a post. I chose the SEO Ultimate plug-in. This plug-in has lots of features that can help to improve the SEO, or search engine optimization, for your posts. I recommend SEO Ultimate if you want to increase traffic to your blog.
After you install the plug-in, you will see an SEO Settings box at the bottom of the Edit Post screen in WordPress.
In the SEO Settings box, I added the title tag and the meta description for the post for both the search engine listing and the social networks listing. By default, the text at the beginning of the post displays, but you can choose any text that you want to show as a link preview for your blog post.
I updated the meta descriptions for all of the posts, but I found that a few of the posts continued to show the additional text at the beginning of the link description. If some of your posts still show the wrong text at the beginning of the link description, you will need to follow the next step to correct it.
Use Facebook Debugger
Facebook uses caching, which may prevent the updates from displaying in the link previews. To correct the problem, you should run the Facebook debugger. The Facebook debugger will run a report and show any problems with the web page. When you run the debugger on a URL, it also resets the Facebook cache.
After I ran the Facebook debugger for the posts that did not update, the link descriptions showed the correct link preview in Facebook. Problem solved!
