Forcing Facebook to Update the Preview

Have you ever posted something to Facebook with a link and the preview was not what you were expecting?

It could be that your web page was cached by Facebook and then you made changes to the page.  To save resources, instead of re-caching the page, it shows what it has in storage, so to speak.

Maybe you posted to Facebook and then saw that your page description was wrong or there was a typo in the first paragraph.  You make the change to the web page, but now how do you get Facebook to show the new stuff instead of the old?

Keep reading!

This just happened to me.  I was looking through some posts on my business page and saw this:

I have a couple of problems with this message.  First, the image is completely not related to what the post is about and second, I see “Strategic Virtual Solutions” in one area and “YourOnlineMarketingTeam.com” in the other area.  We’re now fully transitioned away from Strategic Virtual Solutions, so I need Facebook to refresh.

The above image no longer even exists on that page!

Now, Facebook does periodically refresh its cache, so I’ve read.  I’m not sure how often they do that, and more than likely you need this fixed faster, and you can take care of it yourself.

Go here:
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug

Type in the URL that you want to refresh, then click on “Debug”
If the preview is still showing the old preview, click on “scrape again”.  (I did this for five URLs and had to “scrape again” for one of them).

And now the above post is updated.  I did have to delete the old post and re-post, but had I re-posted before debugging, Facebook would have still pulled the old information.