Shareaholic counter wont display after HTTPS update

Hey @claitonlord

There could be a few different things happening here.

First, unfortunately, if you change your site from HTTP to HTTPS, it is technically a change in your URL structure according to Pinterest, LinkedIn, Facebook, and the other sites that keep track of the share counts. This means if you had 10 shares on an HTTP URL, but then change it to HTTPS, when Shareaholic retrieves the share counts for you, they could come back as zero.

This is a helpful tool you can use to see how many shares are tracked for different URLs:
https://sharetally.co/

You can put different versions of your URLs into this site (with and without HTTPS) and see how many shares are tracked (they will retrieve the share counts directly from the different social platforms).

Is there a specific URL you believe had many shares, but is now not displaying anything?

Greg
Shareaholic

Thanks Greg.

I did the check with an article that had more than 2K shares on Facebook, but it wont display the Facebook counts. Look: https://sharetally.co/395019. It did for LinkedIN and Google+ though. I tried another URL with more than 2K shares, but same thing. I posted the articles on HTTP. I entered the URL in HTTP and HTTPS, but with same results. Facebook wont display anything at all, not even a 0.

These are the URLS’s:

https://www.stijnspreekt.nl/aanklachten-zwarte-piet-door-de-tijd-heen-eerste-in-1930/

https://www.stijnspreekt.nl/waarom-vele-witte-nederlanders-haten-op-sylvana-simons/

What to do?

• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by ClaitonLord.
• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by ClaitonLord.

Thanks for providing those 2 URLs. It is definitely an issue of HTTP vs HTTPS, which Facebook considers to be a different URL. Here is a tool directly from Facebook where you can see the difference:

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/sharing/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.stijnspreekt.nl%2Faanklachten-zwarte-piet-door-de-tijd-heen-eerste-in-1930%2F

This shows you the number of shares+likes+comments for an HTTPS version of one of your articles. And then if you change it to instead use the HTTP version, we can see there are 4,173 in total:
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/sharing/?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.stijnspreekt.nl%2Faanklachten-zwarte-piet-door-de-tijd-heen-eerste-in-1930%2F

It’s a terrible impact, but when you switch to HTTPS you can lose all of your share totals. At Shareaholic we are working on a solution to this problem and in early 2017 we expect to have a product available that can “combine” the share counts for HTTP and HTTPS. When that becomes available it should be very useful for you!

In the meantime, one thing you could do is for certain pages where you had many many shares, you could customize your “canonical URL” meta tag. Changing this would override the URL that would be retrieved and shared for pages on your site. You could customize this tag for certain pages of your site, so that they pointed back to the HTTP version of the page. Doing this could get complicated quickly, and we would only recommend doing this for some of your pages that had a very high share count for the HTTP version. A plugin such as Yoast could help you customize your meta tags very specifically in order to achieve this.

We hope this helps!
Greg

Ow my God! So i lost almost all of my sharecounts? Wauw. That sucks big time Greg. You should really fix this indeed. To bad you guys didnt do this already in times like these.

So the Facebook sharecounts is still working, but starts all over from 0 now? And why do i still see the LinkedIn and Google+ ones?

I have Yoast. I wanna change the “canonical URL” for those 2 articles. Can you tell me where to do this?

Thanks Greg!

• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by ClaitonLord.
• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by ClaitonLord.

Yes it can be very frustrating! Historically we have always simply relied upon the 3rd party platforms to keep track of the share counts (Facebook, Pinterest, etc). However, recently many sites are switching to HTTPS so this has become a bigger issue. This is why we are building a service to “consolidate” the share counts.

I talked about your situation with one of our engineers and the “canonical URL” solution with Yoast is not going to do exactly what we want.

Here is what we recommend instead, with two options:

Option 1) Add a total share count to your pages, in addition to the existing Shareaholic buttons:

Reference this guide:
https://support.shareaholic.com/hc/en-us/articles/207374666-Total-Share-Counter-Advanced-Settings

You can select any URL you would like, and insert the total share count box with this URL. So you would put this on an HTTPS page, but replace the HTTPS part of the link with HTTP instead. The box will then display the total number of shares from the HTTP version of the page.

Option 2) Replace the Shareaholic buttons on specific pages

You can do this by going to the PAGE settings in WordPress and clicking “Hide Share Buttons”. Any page where you do this will no longer display the standard share buttons.

Next, for the pages where you have clicked to “Hide Share Buttons” you would want replace it with a custom code, as found here:

https://support.shareaholic.com/hc/en-us/articles/200470606-Customize-Shareaholic-Location-on-Individual-WordPress-Pages-and-Sidebars

This will allow you to insert a Shareaholic sharing module anywhere you would like onto the page, and you can specify the URL to use for the box. Here you would replace the HTTPS part of the URL with the HTTP version.

We hope these options help!
Greg
Shareaholic.com

Thank Greg. So when i use one of these options, will new shares stil be added? I think not. It probably static, right?

So is my Facebook sharecounter still active on all my other articles? Do new shares still get added?

For option 1, new shares would be added to the HTTPS version of the page. This is because we would NOT be changing the link URL within the share buttons.

For option 2, new shares would be added to the HTTP version of the page. This is because we WOULD be changing the link URL within the share buttons.

As you can see, these options both introduce some complexity, and both positives and negatives that you may want to consider.

Ok.

But when im gonna use option 1, the old (HTTP)shares come back and the new (HTTPS) are added for those specific URLs, right?

That is correct. In option 1 you will be adding a new share count box to the page, and you can specify any URL you want for this share count box. The idea is to specify the HTTP URL. Whichever URL you specify, the share counts for that URL will be retrieved!

Ok Greg. 2 questions:

Where do i exactly fix option 1? I cant find it.

In the advanced settings i see a red bar saying: “cant reach Shareaholic servers”. So its not working at all right now?

Update on question 2. It has resolved itself. Shareaholic was out of service for a short time.

Is Shareaholic normally working for new shares right now after my HTTPS migration Greg?

• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by ClaitonLord.
• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by ClaitonLord.

Looks like we had some periodic technical issues overnight last night that caused some server errors/warnings.

But otherwise yes, Shareaholic is normally working for new shares after your HTTPS migration. Any new shares will be counted to your HTTPS URLs, unless you do some kind of modifications as we have discussed above.

As for how to begin implementing a “Total Share Counter” this is done via the Shareaholic.com console, not your WordPress admin console. This article outlines how to turn one off or on:

https://support.shareaholic.com/hc/en-us/articles/204975969-Total-Share-Counter-How-to-turn-off-on

And then this article outlines how to customize the feature so that it uses a custom HTTP URL instead of the default HTTPS URL:

https://support.shareaholic.com/hc/en-us/articles/207374666-Total-Share-Counter-Advanced-Settings

Ok Greg. So i need to use this one:

<?php echo do_shortcode ('[shareaholic app="total_share_count"]'); ?>

With this one:

https://www.stijnspreekt.nl/aanklachten-zwarte-piet-door-de-tijd-heen-eerste-in-1930/

How do i need to combine them?

Btw Greg, i know it has probbaly nothing to do with the plugin, but since the HTTPS migration my articles are displayed like this. Super annoying and i have really no idea how to fix it. Can you help me solve this? Would be really great!

Hi –

You would combine them as outlined in this article:
https://support.shareaholic.com/hc/en-us/articles/207374666-Total-Share-Counter-Advanced-Settings

So it would end up looking like this:

<?php echo do_shortcode ('[shareaholic app="total_share_count" data-link="https://www.stijnspreekt.nl/aanklachten-zwarte-piet-door-de-tijd-heen-eerste-in-1930/"]'); ?>

You just set the data-link value to the URL you want to show.

For the other display issue, I really don’t know how to fix that, sorry!

Greg

Ok, i added the code in the particular post (layout) in WordPress, right on top, but i dont see nothing at all.

https://www.stijnspreekt.nl/aanklachten-zwarte-piet-door-de-tijd-heen-eerste-in-1930/

What did i do wrong?