If you are the owner of a blog or web page, surely on more than one occasion you have wanted to share your articles through Facebook and they do not show how you would like in the social network. Sometimes the image may appear outdated, the title may be slightly different from the one you used or that change in the description is not shown as it should.
This is usually very frustrating since even if we edit the original post, the error will continue to be displayed on Facebook. A very simple and quick way to solve this problem is to clear the Facebook cache but ... do you know how to do it?
What is the Facebook cache?
We could consider the Facebook cache as the internal memory of the social network where the data of all the shared publications are stored. This serves to a greater extent to facilitate access to this shared content quickly and without affecting the user's browsing experience.
To give a simple example, when someone shares a post through Facebook, it is stored in the memory of the social network. Thus, when a user shares the publication again, Facebook will take the data stored in their system instead of going to the original source. That is why even if you edit your post, it will always appear in the same way on Facebook.
Why is it important to clear the Facebook cache?
If you are a blogger or content creator over the Internet, it is essential that you know how to clear the Facebook cache. As we have explained in the previous point, if you made a mistake in your piece of content, it will be stored on Facebook indefinitely and will be shared with that same fault by all its users. It doesn't matter if you modify your blog or website, the error will still be stored on Facebook.
You can only get rid of it if you first correct the errors in the Open Graph meta tags of your post and then clear the Facebook cache.
How to correct Facebook Open Graph tags
When sharing a post, Facebook takes all the information from its Open Graph tags. These are found in the head of your HTML code and respond to this data:
- -og: title- This will be the title of your Facebook post and must have a maximum of 75 characters, otherwise it will be cut. If you don’t add a title, Facebook will default to the name of your article.
- -og: description- This is the description that appears under the title of your article in the social network. Make sure you don’t exceed 195 characters or it will be cut again. If this tag does not exist, Facebook will default to the SEO description of your post or the first paragraph of the text.
- -og:image- As you can imagine, this label corresponds to the image of the text. It should have a maximum size of 200px x 200px, otherwise Facebook will take a random image of your article or simply will not show any.
- -og: url- Here you must enter the URL of your article.
How to clear the Facebook cache
Now that you have your content updated and corrected you can start the process to clear the Facebook cache. To do this you simply have to use the tool created by the same social network: Facebook Debugger.
To start the process, simply click here to get to Facebook Debugger and enter the URL you need Facebook to update your system. Once this is done, click on the “Debug” button.
After that Facebook will show you:
- The date of the last extraction of the page.
- The URL crawled in its origin.
- Your canonical URL
- The IP and a preview of the link it will show.
If you want to update the information, simply click on “Scrape Again”. Facebook will track your article again and will be stored with all the changes made. As simple as that!
We hope this little guide will help you to clear the Facebook cache with Facebook Debugger.
