How can I Stop Facebook from "Scraping" Images in My Sidebar Widgets?

  • I had another thread going about facebook Open graph issues but felt I needed to start this thread and seek an answer on a specific problem as a sort of workaround.

    Facebook “scrapes” img src codes from my sidebar widgets and tries to display them as optional thumbnails for posts when I share the post link urls in a facebook status on my page or profile. If I get rid of all images in my widget facebook is at this time properly displaying the post image as the most relevant image.

    i’m not sure why this is such an insanely difficult thing for facebook and open graph what with their billions of dolllars and all but I have spent about 16 hours straight trying to figure out WTF is going on with this and this definitely isn’t the first time I’ve run into these issues, but maybe the first time I am DETERMINED to find a real fix! (end rant, or is it?)

    If anyone knows how I can continue using img src html in my widgets and somehow keep them from being scraped by facebook’s inefficient scraping bots I would be eternally grateful to you.

    I need to display adverts/images via html in my widgets but I cannot stand this insanity about sharing posts on facebook and having those totally unrelated images be choices to share with the post… and why does the post image I want to use for a post url show up as the last image in the list of possibilities???? why on earth would the first option be the images in my sidebar widgets when open graph is specifically picking the correct image when I view the url in the linter debugger? that just doesn’t make any sense to me!?!

    I’m really suprised I still have hair on my head, please help me someone anyone with a real answer. There are countless questions like this looming around the internet and I cannot find a straight answer anywhere for the last 16 hours of searching and scanning everything I can find… I am tired I need sleep but I also have a press release going out to drive traffic to my site and I want people to be able to share my url’s socially without any of this crappy image scraping issues…

    please help!!!!

    just as an aside, I have no coding in my custom_functions dealing with fb open graph and opted to use the seo plugin from yoast which according to facebook’s linter debugger is working accordingly.

    I am using thesis 1.8.5 theme

    this is the site I am working on https://www.yorkiesfanclub.com

    right now I have no images in the sidebar but I really need to put them back soon but I if I do I don’t want them being scraped by facebook and listed as optins when I try to share any of my posts… again that is just… ugh…

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

  • Same issue for me. Did you make any progress working it out?

    Michael.

    Thread Starter Overzealous99

    (@overzealous99)

    I never figured out how to stop it from scraping any images in the sidebar so I just removed the images from the sidebar. I started using the SEO Yoast plugin which seemed to help to pick the right images, however, if I recall correctly even though I had that plugin going, facebook still wants to grab the images from the sidebar.

    It is a bit disappointing no one has responded to this thread with a formidable answer for something that is so common an issue. I’ve searhced around way too much time online trying to find an answer but never came across one that was satisfactory.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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