Problem with Social publishing to FB and missing featured image

I used the Facebook debugger on the URL and I get the following:

Error code 403

This response code could be due to a robots.txt block. Please allowlist facebookexternalhit on your sites robots.txt config to utilize Facebook scraping

What does this mean?

• This reply was modified 4 months, 2 weeks ago by dupuisg.

I have figured out why the Publish button had disappeared and it is related to an archive Status plugin I use…so I deactivated the plugin and published a new post…the same FB problem exists but the email notification does contain the Featured image.

Hi there, @dupuisg,

Thanks for the follow-ups – I am glad to see that you have made some progress troubleshooting your issues.

I checked your site, and while Jetpack is well connected (which is a great place to start), it seems liek Jetpack Social isn’t enabled at the moment. This is why your latest test post didn’t get shared in Facbook.

Could you please enable Jetpack Social here? https://wordpress.com/marketing/connections/yoursiteurl

As for the specific problem of Facebook not grabbing any feature image, please ensure that your images meet Facebook’s?recommended image dimensions. Also, always clear your site’s cache after making changes, as this can often solve such issues.

Hope that’s all clear! Let me know how you get on, and we’ll take it from there if necessary ??

The disabling of Jetpack Social was done after the scraping issue was discovered after an automatic post to FB did not display the featured image…I turned off Jetpack Social to do some debugging and found out that even when Social is disabled my subscribers were notified about by Test post…so we have a problem there also…all my featured images are 960 by 960 and prior to June I have never had any issue with featured images showing up in my FB post…case in point, the following link works just find when shared on FB…

https://dupuisg.ca/2023/12/25/spain-2023/

I am curious about clearing my website cache…I did clear my browser cache before publishing but I have never heard about clearing the website cache…how would that be done.?

And this is the result when I used the Facebook debugger on the URL and I get the following:

Error code 403

This response code could be due to a robots.txt block. Please allowlist facebookexternalhit on your sites robots.txt config to utilize Facebook scraping

What does this mean?

Hi there @dupuisg,

You did discover many things to address! I’m going to tackle them one by one as follows ??

I turned off Jetpack Social to do some debugging and found out that even when Social is disabled my subscribers were notified about by Test post…so we have a problem there also…

This is related to a different feature you might have enabled, the Newsletter feature: it works with or without the Social sharing feature. I’d recommend turning the feature temporarily off every time you need to publish a test post and re-enabling it right after so your subscribers won’t receive unwanted posts.

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case in point, the following link works just find when shared on FB…

https://dupuisg.ca/2023/12/25/spain-2023/

I see this is an old post from 2023; if my theory about the 403 error block you reported (see below) is correct, it’s possible that this post can be shared on Facebook correctly because it’s not affected by the block you’re having at the moment, which might involve only recent posts.

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Error code 403

This response code could be due to a robots.txt block. Please allowlist facebookexternalhit on your sites robots.txt config to utilize Facebook scraping

That’s not directly related to Jetpack Social: it looks like you have a block at your server’s end (in the robots.txt file) blocking the Facebook tool that “reads” the information needed to proceed with the data sharing. I’d recommend contacting your host about that to see if they can sort that out for you. Once that’s amended, hopefully Social should resume its usual work. ??

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I am curious about clearing my website cache…I did clear my browser cache before publishing but I have never heard about clearing the website cache…how would that be done.?

Not only can you clear your browser cache, but there are software that can take care of the site’s internal cache too, and are useful to keep the site efficient.

I’d recommend trying WP Super Cache, which is a free, low-maintenance plugin that’s 100% compatible with Jetpack.

Hey @dupuisg,

Do you have updates about that, do you still need help? We usually close inactive threads after one week of no movement, but we want to make sure we’re all set before marking it as solved. Thanks!