Is there a way to force Facebook to show the og:image on shared links?

Question

We have a Facebook app that generates custom shareable links for users when they complete certain activities. The shareable pages have the following meta tags:

  <meta property="fb:admins" content="1000000000000000">
  <meta property="fb:app_id" content="1000000000000000">
  <meta property="og:site_name" content="ActivityApp">
  <meta property="og:title" content="I just completed this activity.">
  <meta property="og:description" content="Click here to see John's activity!">
  <meta property="og:type" content="website">
  <meta property="og:url" content="http://activity.com/abcd69478383951886c14ae">
  <meta property="og:image:type" content="image/png">
  <meta property="og:image:width" content="800">
  <meta property="og:image:height" content="420">
  <meta property="og:image" content="http://cdn.com/abcd69478383951886c14ae.png">
  <meta name="author" content="John">

Most of the time, Facebook will correctly show the title, description, and image on the Newsfeed when the links are shared. But sometimes, the og:image and og:title will be hidden for no reason. This is what it looks like...

The strange part is that when we check the link on the debugger by clicking Show existing scrape information it would say that it was correctly scraped and would display the title, image, and description at the bottom.

Why does this happen, and what can we do to make sure that our links will display correctly every time they are shared?

Additional info: our app generates millions of stories so we can't manually do anything to the links.

Moskow

Did you check if the URL is crawlable? In your example code. The property="og:image" link is broke. It shows 404 page. – Branching

@JohnRoca, yes the links are crawlable. In fact, if we re-scrape them, everything will show up fine. The problem is with the existing scrape information. – Moskow

Probably this answer works for you: #36609280 – Humeral

Answer 1

I still cannot post comments, so I try to give my answer: try using og:image:url instead of og:image. I know they should be the same, but sometimes it works.

link to answer

Iluminadailwain

Answer 2

Read and try any of these:

1. https://photographylife.com/how-to-make-facebook-show-images-in-links
2. http://www.addthis.com/academy/how-to-optimize-facebook-sharing/

There are plenty of suggestions that you can try but I don't have concrete knowledge about that so you can search for more information in the google page.

Jaejaeger

Downvoted. This solution is not relevant to fix millions of shared links as OP mentioned. – Quijano

Answer 3

People used to work on this: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object/

But you can also try this: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/sharing

If you still can't make the image there, then it must be something wrong with your website. Unless you can provide an actual link to your resource, I can't do any further help.

Calceiform