Meta Description replaced by Widget copy in Facebook post link

All in One SEO Pack does have options for managing Social Meta, including Facebook, but it looks like you aren’t using that module. Therefore, nothing All in One SEO Pack is doing on your site should influence the content that Facebook decides to display from it. It could be that the ad on your site has changed, or that Facebook has changed how it scrapes content from your site. I’d suggest taking a look at the Facebook Debugger to try to troubleshoot this. Or, you could try using our Social Meta module and see if it helps with your issue as well.

Peter,

Can’t thank you enough for the education. I’m not a techie so I just go along until something doesn’t work then need to learn something new. I had no idea Facebook created its own Open Graphic Objects code (OG). All these years, I thought meta titles and descriptions were enough. Facebook I guess loves to make things more complex or rather thinks the world should revolve around it so they now force us to add OG meta data. Who knew?

The Facebook Debugger worked great. Showed the OG errors. I never paid attention to All in One’s Social Meta feature out of ignorance about these things. I activated it and figured out how to work the specifications and all is well with the world. Now my OG code shows in the page source and the debugger shows no errors.

One thing that may need to be changed is All In One’s description about the Default Image title setting or this could be a glitch. If you set it to Default, it does not read the image specified in the post and puts the default into the OG image. You have to set it to Custom for it to use the Custom image you specify in your post Social Meta settings.

donshapiro,

Great, glad you’ve got this working; you can use the Select OG:Image Source option to manage which image gets used by default for the OG:Image here (you can override this in the settings on each individual post). Here’s what those options mean:

Default Image – use the image specified as the default image on the settings page
Featured Image – use the featured image from the post
First Attached Image – use the first attached image on the post (media attachments)
First Image In Content – use the first image tag found in the content of the post
Image From Custom Field – use an image specified from a custom field (field name specified in the settings)
First Available Image – goes through all of these options automatically

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the explanation. I’ve spent some time playing around with this and have discovered something Social Meta doesn’t handle that may call for some more image fields.

If I put an image URL in default field, it will always go to that image and Facebook will not offer any other options. Often in Facebook, we will see a tiny arrow that allows us to pick from more than one image pulled from a page. But if we put an image in the Default image field, that’s all we get and nothing else.

If we do not put any image in the Default image field, then Facebook will present us with two image options.

Now, here is the real quark. If you go to the website in question (https://pleaidians.net), you will see a big blue book image in the right sidebar, a purple triangle in the left sidebar and a mutli-colored music album in the footer. These are the three largest images on the page and I believe the only images on the home page.

Now watch the bouncing ball. If we place the purple triangle in the default image field, we get the purple triangle in our Facebook link. If we place nothing in that field, we are only offered the blue book and music album but not the purple triangle.

Since we set up this site, we have never been able to get Facebook to ever pull that purple triangle on its own. Only when we lock down the spec to just that image will Facebook pull it. All three images are well over 200×200.

So, when Facebook in all its stupidity doesn’t like certain images when left to its own devices, we would like to be able to specify (lock down) more than one possible image to choose from in the Social Meta page. I would like to see 4 image fields available. That way, we can control what images are used and if we put more than one in under default, then Facebook will give us the option as which to choose.

Our problem with this website is we want to go back and forth between the blue book and the purple triangle. We can’t do that right now with your software. It’s either the blue book or the triangle.

Hi Don,

While it is also possible to specify multiple og:image tags on a page, we currently don’t do this. Also, obviously we can’t control which images Facebook chooses to display on its own. However, can’t you specify either image from the plugin, and won’t that still show up in Facebook?

In any case, here’s some example code showing how you could manually add another og:image tag across your site:

add_action( 'aioseop_modules_wp_head', 'don_add_book_image_meta', 6 );

function don_add_book_image_meta() {
echo '<meta property="og:image" content="https://firstconcepts.com/testpleiadians/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Comes-The-Awakening-Cover-Kindle.jpg" />' . "\n";
}