Facebook post shows #_NAME and #_EXCERPT and random image

Is the issue occurring for a specific URL and if so can you please provide us with the URL so that we can check the Open Graph metadata that the Yoast SEO plugin is outputting?

Also, if you are seeing unexpected behavior or appearance for one of your site’s social previews when sharing it on social media, this can be caused by the social media site caching old metadata for that page. This is why you may not immediately see the new values you set up for the page reflected in the page’s preview when you share it (image, title, description, etc).

To resolve this, we would first recommend to try checking your page’s link using Facebook’s Sharing Debugger tool located at https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/sharing/. Can you please try running the Facebook Sharing Debugger on the page you are experiencing the issue on, and under ‘When and how we last scraped the URL’ clicking the ‘Scrape Again’ option and letting us know whether this resolves the issue? The ‘Scrape Again’ option will force Facebook to update it’s cache for your page’s link.

Please note that to successfully update the cache it may require re-scraping your page several times as whether the page’s data can be read may take several requests between Facebook and the server your website is hosted on. Also, this guide includes more information on this and explains in detail how to do this: https://kb.yoast.com/kb/facebook-sharing-updated-details/

Hi,

Thank you for your reply.

The site is https://www.harfordsheart.com

I ran the debugger and it showed the following errors:

Warnings That Should Be Fixed
Invalid URL Provided og:image URL, #_EVENTIMAGEURL was not a valid URL.

Missing Properties
The following required properties are missing: fb:app_id

I clicked the scrape again button and will see what happens.

Please let me know what you find.

Thank you.

After reviewing the code for your site, you are outputting multiple copies of the OpenGraph tags. This can cause problems when sharing content on social media sites.

The tags output by Yoast include the correct image links. The additional set include incorrect output.

<meta property="og:type" content="event" />
<meta property="og:title" content="#_NAME"/>
<meta property="og:url" content="#_EVENTPAGEURL"/>
<meta property="og:image" content="#_EVENTIMAGEURL"/>
<meta property="og:description" content="#_EXCERPT" />
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" />
<meta name="twitter:description" content="#_EXCERPT" />

Please disable plugins or theme functions that add additional tags. If you are unsure what is adding the additional tags, please run a conflict check following the steps here: How To Check For Plugin Conflicts

Hah! That was it! The Events Made Easy plugin was inserting custom meta tags. I removed them from the settings and now it works!

Thank you! It was driving me crazy!