Meta description seriously truncated in Fb shares

  • Resolved vesaraiskila

    (@vesaraiskila)


    6 years ago

    We’re using the Yoast SEO plugin (version 9.2.1) on our WordPress site.

    Even when the number of characters in a blog post’s meta description is nowhere near the character limit, the description is truncated in Facebook’s link preview upon sharing the published post.

    Only slightly over 70 characters of the description are shown, followed by three dots, in Fb shares. This is quite inconvenient. It didn’t happen some months ago, but currently it seems to happen every time.

    An example of the truncation can be seen by following the link below (“The page I need help with:”).

    Thank you very much for helping!

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Plugin Support amboutwe

    (@amboutwe)

    The tag in your site’s source code is output with the complete description. However, Facebook is truncating it in the preview. As the truncation happens on Facebook’s side, there is little you can do to force Facebook to show the full description.

    Thread Starter vesaraiskila

    (@vesaraiskila)

    Thank you, amboutwe. In that case, it is surprising that Facebook has started truncating the description so much. Even more surprising is that sometimes Facebook does not show the description at all, as with the post I published today – could you have a look?

    https://tinyurl.com/ydft8vgb

    (I shortened the very long link.)

    Only the article image, the name of our website and the article heading are shown. That is why I had to manually add a descriptive text when posting the link on Facebook. I find this very strange.

    Plugin Support amboutwe

    (@amboutwe)

    From the shared links I’ve seen recently, Facebook seems to limit the preview to two lines with the title and/or description. If the title is longer than 1 line, the description is ignored. As before, this is all handled on Facebook’s side and the full title and description are included in the source code.

    You can see exactly what Facebook receives and displays using their debugger tool: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/

    Thread Starter vesaraiskila

    (@vesaraiskila)

    Thank you very much, amboutwe! Your replies clarified the issue to me. It was good to know that everything is indeed working as specified.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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