Problem with Facebook images

Hi @feejuk,

There might be an issue with your robots.txt file, which causes Facebook to look elsewhere for images.
You should remove the file from your root directory through FTP, and let WordPress (plus TSF) handle it automatically for you; which will definitely help indexing and sharing of your site.
“Crawl-delay” also has no notable positive impact.

Thanks Sybre, I’ve now removed our robot.txt. How long should it take for WP/TSF to generate the robot.txt file? As of now, no robot.txt has appeared since the manual removal.

Hi @feejuk,

No problem ??

The file is virtual. So, you won’t see it being placed in your root directory.
It takes roughly 0.025 seconds to generate, and it’s generated anew on each request.

On some pages, it now fetches the footer Instagram images. On other pages, it still converts the og:image to a pixel placeholder.

Are you using “security” plugins on your website, which might block the Facebook crawler from fetching the images?

Yup, it’s strange, isn’t it? I don’t know why it’s pulling Instagram images on some articles and nothing on the others.

No, we haven’t got any security plugins active. Everything was working up until the installation of SEO Framework.

However, one point which I forgot to address, but now that we’re stretched for ideas, I’m guessing it could be relevant. When we installed SEO Framework, we also had OG Plugin installed. Forgetting that we had this, our pages now had conflicting meta tags in place.

When I uploaded my first image to Facebook since the update, and found the image failing to crawl, I proceeded to the Facebook debugger tool to diagnose the problem. Facebook debugger informed me that I had multiple meta tags in-play. Ah crap, I thought. So I went and removed the OG plugin entirely. So now our website has the meta tags from only your plugin. Then, I tested it on Facebook – and it started pulling all of these Instagram photos of ours and failing to acknowledge the image tags in-play.

So this is where I’m at now. I’m struggling for ideas here.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by feejuk.

Hi @feejuk,

I too am struggling for ideas, especially since this is an edge-case scenario.
I’ll check in daily to see if there are any improvements, it might just be a caching bug or fluke at Facebook’s side.

The following simply doesn’t add up, and it really seems that Facebook’s crawler is being redirected… because you’ve disabled Twitter output tags (yet Facebook recognizes them):

View post on imgur.com

• This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by Sybre Waaijer.

I’m experimenting with different images at the moment to see if I can figure something out and I feel I may have caught onto something that could be causing Facebook some trouble in crawling.

All of my article banners are 1900×1200.

It seems your plugin automatically resizes all of my images to 1500×938 (unless they’re smaller) See the image here to see the code.

I’m wondering, is there any chance of allowing me the option to retain the original 1920×1200 of my article banner image in my meta tags? I don’t see an option anywhere to retain this size in my SEO settings and I’ve certainly had some odd experiences on Facebook’s end with smaller image sizes for some reason.

Anytime I’m attempting to upload a custom image of 1900×1200 via the custom social image tab, it’s automatically choosing to revert back to 1500×938. 1900×1200 was the size our meta tags were using on Facebook before all of these problems arose, so I simply wish to see what happens when this size is back in-play with all our meta tags. Can we try it?

Note: I also don’t have the option to avoid cropping an image upon uploading/selecting the image in custom social image selection. Is it possible to have an option to not crop the image? This creates unnecessary duplicates in the website’s media archive.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by feejuk.

I generally see this error on fresh posts and use the debug tool on Facebook to fetch the same post 2 or 3 times until it is correct.

Assuming it’s the same error I get this video shows what I do..
https://youtu.be/_m8bfR3XTnA

Hey Harry, thank you for your suggestion. Sadly, this problem now extends far beyond simply refreshing the Facebook debugger crawler. This was the first process I undertook upon discovering this problem, with no luck.

Sorry it didn’t help. ??

• This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by harryshawk.

The maximum sizes for the Open Graph and Twitter images are 1500px/1500px by default.

You can skip cropping of social images must they be smaller than 1500px width and height.

This was done to support the 1MB size limit of Twitter and the format restrictions in Instagram and LinkedIn.

I just redid my investigation, and I found the following:
Now, 4K is on the rise and on every popular platform they’ve massively increased allowed sizes.

What does this mean?
– Image-size optimization might be removed from The SEO Framework. This will speed up rendering drastically! I’ll be sure to implement these improvements in an upcoming update, whereas you’ll also be allowed to use large images without cropping (up to 4096x4096px).

But, you shouldn’t have to worry about this for now. If anything, the impact is unnotable unless you have ten thousands of images and/or pages.

Hi @feejuk,

I’ve got a few updates:

1. Version 2.9.3 now has 4K image support, which I’m currently live testing @ theseoframework.com (and it’s working well!).
2. I also encountered the “image too large” issue on Facebook on one of my sites, but the error disappeared after the second try…
3. Your site shares well on Twitter. So there’s a plus ??
4. Facebook Debugger now shows the correct metatags for your site (another plus!), but the images still don’t come through.
5. Your site is accessible on both HTTP and HTTPS. You might wish to set a Preferred Scheme in the General SEO settings meta box (canonical tab) to prevent duplicated content issues.
6. I see you’re very active on Facebook. Consider signing up for a Facebook App ID and use it within TSF.