A while ago I experimented with facebook apps and I specified custom og:types on my website.
It's a photo website with about 20,000 individual URL's and growing by about 1000 per week and the two object types I specified were these:
<meta property="og:type" content="mynamespace:album" />
(for thumbnail overview pages of a photo album, currently about 200 of these)
<meta property="og:type" content="mynamespace:picture" />
(for detail view of individual images, currently about 20,000 of these)
However, I never followed through with developing a custom app because I felt it wasn't worth users having to sign in and authorise my app just to like/share pictures so I ended up using the standard social plugin "like button" on these pages.
Unfortunately I forgot to remove the custom object types though. Now the likes on the social button seems to be counting correctly and the facebook linter doesn't complain about anything, but I am a bit worried if there are any adverse implications by leaving it like that, because when I removed the custom type temporarily (which I thought would then default to og:type website) the debugger warned me that the object previously had another type and that data might be corrupted. It is now using the custom object types again until I can find a solution...
So what should I do? Remove the custom types or leave them? What are the implications of either option? Is my content being shared correctly on the users walls if a user clicks the social plugin "like" and it finds a custom og:type?
Would be grateful if someone could clarify the best way out of this mess without screwing up all the accumulated user activity from the social plugin.
Thank you!
Facebook encourages developers to tag their content using open graph tags using tags that relate as closely as possible to the content itself. There will be no adverse effects to changing the tags present in a pre-existing tag, and it is just a warning that Facebook outputs, in case you had changed the tags by mistake.
Facebook uses the tags to categorise incoming posts (as the first time it is liked, Facebook sends a scraper to your page to find out what it can about it), and in the end, "anything helps". By changing the tag, it won't affect the classification of the posts published previously, but any new posts will have the new tag information.
If your new tags more closely resemble the content, then change away.