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Strange Facebook Debugger errors with Blogger links: redirects to “.pe”, says “article:author” unsupported by “og:type” “article”

Starting yesterday evening I noticed sharing links to my Blogger blog on Facebook wasn’t working right: images failed to load, the meta description was missing, various other errors. (Sharing links from other sites worked fine, so this seemed to be Blogger-exclusive.) Running the permalink through the Facebook Debugger returned 4–5 errors that hadn’t been there for previous links I’d shared, and some of these errors have since disappeared on their own. I figured FB had messed with their scraping system and that it would be rectified soon.

Presently, link-sharing works better, but a couple issues remain that I can’t explain or find any solution to: 1) Facebook tries to redirect my .com blog to .pe, and 2) it claims the meta property article:author is incompatible with the og:type, which is article.

Quick reference links:

For the record, I did some minor meta tag editing the day before this problem began, yet I validated the page when I finished and received no errors at the time (except for the missing fb:app_id, which I ignore).

1) Facebook Debugger redirects to blogspot.­pe

My blog is at preliator2.blogspot.com. Every URL in the site source uses .com. There’s a simple script in the header that redirects any country-specific URLs (blogspot.ca, blogspot.ru, etc.) to .com for reasons of consistency and compatibility.

This has never caused a problem with Facebook sharing. Yet now, the Sharing Debugger gives me this (note the .pe domain):

Fetched URL    https://preliator2.blogspot.com/2017/08/17-Isnt-it-the-thought-that-counts-124.html

Canonical URL  http://preliator2.blogspot.pe/2017/08/17-Isnt-it-the-thought-that-counts-124.html

Redirect Path  Input URL         → https://preliator2.blogspot.com/2017/08/17-Isnt-it-the-thought-that-counts-124.html
               302 HTTP Redirect → https://preliator2.blogspot.pe/2017/08/17-Isnt-it-the-thought-that-counts-124.html
               og:url Meta Tag   → http://preliator2.blogspot.com/2017/08/17-Isnt-it-the-thought-that-counts-124.html

And this is the link preview:
Screencap of link preview with “.pe” domain

Further, on the Object Debugger page, fetching new scrape information gives me this error:

URL Follow Failed: There was an error in fetching the object at URL 'http://preliator2.blogspot.pe/2017/08/17-Isnt-it-the-thought-that-counts-124.html', or one of the the URLs specified via a redirect or the 'og:url' property including one of http://preliator2.blogspot.com/2017/08/17-Isnt-it-the-thought-that-counts-124.html.

To find the object, these are the redirects we had to follow
original https://preliator2.blogspot.com/2017/08/17-Isnt-it-the-thought-that-counts-124.html
302      https://preliator2.blogspot.pe/2017/08/17-Isnt-it-the-thought-that-counts-124.html
og:url   http://preliator2.blogspot.com/2017/08/17-Isnt-it-the-thought-that-counts-124.html
302      http://preliator2.blogspot.pe/2017/08/17-Isnt-it-the-thought-that-counts-124.html
og:url   http://preliator2.blogspot.com/2017/08/17-Isnt-it-the-thought-that-counts-124.html

For some reason, the Facebook scraped URL shows the canonical and other blog links as blogspot.pe, yet in my blog’s actual source, all links are .com. I have no idea why Facebook sees/adds all those .pe domains. The blog isn’t based in Peru.

2) Says article:author isn’t supported by og:type (article)

I also receive the following error from the Sharing Debugger:

The following properties are specified on the webpage but NOT supported for the specified 'og:type': article:author

Yet here are the relevant tags as they appear in the scraped URL:

<meta content="{FB_profile_URL}" property="article:author">
<meta content="article" property="og:type">

Last I checked, article:author is perfectly compatible with og:type article. The meta tags are in the <head> section. I don’t know whether this error is related to the strange .pe redirect issue.

How do I stop that nonsensical redirect and get FB to play nice with author/og:type meta tags?

Update:

Problem’s still occurring. I’ve also done a couple tests, with the following results.

A) I tried sharing a link from another Blogger-hosted site, specifically the Official Blogger Blog (https://blogger.googleblog.com/2017/03/share-your-unique-style-with-new.html). Worked without a hitch. This indicates the problem is specific to my blog.

B) The problem started only a day ago; link sharing worked just fine before then. So I dug up a backup of my blog template from a week ago and applied it to the blog. I then tried sharing a link again and rescraping. No change – even though link sharing worked without any redirects or other issues with this exact template just days ago. (I’ve since reverted back to the newer template, since evidently it doesn’t change anything.)

I still want to think the problem is on Facebook’s end, but this has been going on for almost two days now. If anyone has any ideas, that’d be greatly appreciated.

Solution

  • The problem has since been resolved. Turns it out it was something wonky on Blogger’s end (I was told as much on the Facebook bug forum) and it went away just under a week after it first began. The Debugger errors have disappeared and the blog no longer redirects to .pe.

    If anyone else has similar problems (as I’ve seen on the Blogger forums), all I can suggest is to wait and see if they go away after a week or so.