any solution for facebookexternalhit/1.1 flood?

When someone clicks a Facebook share button on one of your posts, it loads a Facebook page with the url of your post passed in the querystring.
What Facebook then does is to fetch that page and parse it to try and figure out what text and image to show in the share dialog.
That is what shows up in your logs as a hit from Facebook using that externalhit user agent string (https://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php).
It is entirely normal and to be expected if you have your content shared via Facebook.

When Facebook pulls text and images from your site it is only to provide a teaser for the link it is displaying. Your content won’t appear without a link to your site anywhere within Facebook.

I’m not too sure about Facebook’s caching/refetching schedules, but I would have though the number of hits you get from Facebook should be proportional to the number of times your content is shared. I have seen a couple of reports of people getting a spike of hits from Facebook but those seemed to be relatively isolated incidents and probably some misbehaving server on Facebook’s end.

Since the traffic you get from Facebook should constitute only a small portion of the total traffic to your site, I wouldn’t expect the impact to be huge.

You can help make it smaller (and have a bit more control over which images are used) by using open graph protocol meta tags in your site headers, which tell Facebook which image and text to use for any page. That should stop it from loading all the images in order to let the user choose one and thus reduce the bandwidth used. Most SEO plugins allow you to set these.

How many hits are you getting from Facebook vs how many Facebook shares do you have?

Thanks Shen for your reply. It’s fine for me to have my content shared on FB and other social media, and in fact I like it that every time I paste a link to my post on any social media, at least one graphic is loaded to be shown together with the post text. I’ll try to find out more about the open graph protocol meta tags you mentioned (I’m not a pro, so this does not tell me much at the moment).

The problem I am having is the statistics. I guess FB was checking on my website before as well and I had never seen this facebookexternalhits in my stats until I changed to my new website design and got some new plugins to work with it, your crafty button among others. Right now, every time I update anything on my website, the facebookexternalhit gets listed in my stats up to 50% of all the visits per day!
(I am also dealing with semalt crawlers but it probably has nothing to do with the social icons you designed, and I have been reading about possible solutions to it on line.)

I can’t state here that it all started once I got your plugin installed, because– as I wrote– I changed the entire website so there were many elements that could influence the change in stats. It would be wonderful to be able to keep your buttons on my website, and I have not tried to remove them and see if they bring the facebookexternalhit traffic or not. Also, it doesn’t mean that if I chose other social buttons, the problem would be solved, right?

My website is relatively young and there is no big traffic to it yet, so I am not facing the problems described by some people about their websites going down because of the extensive traffic load. I’d like to be in control of what’s going on with the stats and possibly block the robots from visiting my website, though.

Do you think that there is a way to add something to my website code or maybe to your plugin design so I could block the facebookexternalhit from being listed in my stats?

If you offer the option to share to Facebook, you will be getting hits from the Facebook bot. It doesn’t make any difference whether you use this plugin, any of the other plugins that offer a Facebook share option or you code it yourself. If you want to share to Facebook, its crawler will try to visit your site.

If you use robots.txt to block the Facebook crawler, then Facebook will no longer be able to pull in an image and text from your post when you share it. All that will be shared is the URL itself and whatever the person sharing it types in to describe it. So I really wouldn’t recommend that.

The best way to handle this is to set up filters in your analytics software. That way you can filter out not only the Facebook bot, but also the other search engine crawlers as well, and your own visits to the page, because you don’t want those to show up in your stats either.