Sharing: Social share counts are gone

@jeherve ,

Wow, Jeremy! Thanks! I will get busy working with your plugin now.

I recently upgraded to the Jetpack professional plan and have the Jetpack SEO tools activated. That will not interfere with your plugin, correct?

Thanks again for the great service!

That will not interfere with your plugin, correct?

No it won’t, no worries there!

Great! Thanks again!

With special thanks to @jeherve and @theguitarlesson, I’ve met with promising success on the https conversion and mostly preserving the Facebook sharing counts. My hosting company tech support team has been through quite a workout on getting the .htaccess files working to achieve all of this. That was not nearly as simple as it would have seemed. I often got stuck when it just would not work for me and I had to call on them for assistance. At this stage, I believe that most everything is in place, but some things are not working quite right just yet.

One is that my home page had a Facebook share count of over 32K. The Jetpack button, however, reports 10K+ now. How could this be? The Facebook sharing debugger reports:
Fetched URL https://beards.org/
Canonical URL https://www.beards.org/
32737 likes, shares and comments (More Info)

Can this be fixed?

Another problem is that many pages are not showing any share numbers on the Jetpack button. The Facebook sharing debugger can fetch the http version all right. But the Facebook sharing debugger is reporting a 404 on the https version, even though the page is there. Here is one example:
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/sharing/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.beards.org%2Ftodays-beard-william-20170314%2F

In Google Webmaster Tools Search Console, I tried a “fetch as Google”. I was thankful to see that Google does not report a 404. But something is causing Facebook to report a 404. I’ve done some looking around and see that .htaccess might be suspected.

So far, it appears that URLs getting this Facebook 404 are the https versions of URLs that are only changing from http to https (these are not in the category of those being redirected from a subdomain as I described earlier in the thread)In this case the .htaccess is set up to:
— redirect to the “www.” form of the URL if “www.” is omitted
— redirect to http from https
— exempt Facebook crawler from the http-to-https redirect

With the 404 happening for Facebook, I can’t tell what’s going on here. I’ve got the tech support team looking at it. But if there’s anything that might be an obvious cause, please let me know. Thanks!

Okay, hosting tech support tweaked .htaccess somehow and eliminated the Facebook 404 reported from the sharing debugger.

Still unresolved is the strange 10K+ count showing for the home page on the Jetpack button while the debugger reports 32737 shares.

Suddenly just now, the share counts disappeared from the Jetpack button on all pages and posts. I wonder if it could be rate-limiting by FB. I had that happen to me once before during this transition. I’ll take a break for a while and see if they return later.

Still unresolved is the strange 10K+ count showing for the home page on the Jetpack button while the debugger reports 32737 shares.

That’s done on purpose:

• If less than 1,000, we just return the number as is.
• If between 1,000 and 10,000, we return xK+.
• If more than 10,000, we return 10K+

We’re considering changing that default, though! You can follow our progress here:
https://github.com/Automattic/jetpack/issues/5107

Suddenly just now, the share counts disappeared from the Jetpack button on all pages and posts. I wonder if it could be rate-limiting by FB.

They seem to be back now, so rate-limiting might indeed have been your issue.

Thanks, Jeremy, @jeherve . I’m glad to know it’s not a problem being caused from my side.

I would vote in favor of the change. I’d be pleased to see it show 1K increments from 1000 on up and not forever remain at 10K+ once that number is reached.

Yes, the counts returned after some time away from the keyboard here. That was good to see.

Thanks again for all your help!

This topic went over my head fairly quickly, however as more people switch from http to https there will be requests for a more inclusive http & https social count.

Is there any way that we can request taht this be a feature request?

Thanks,

L

Unfortunately it’s something that needs to be implemented on Facebook’s and other social media platforms. It’s not something that Jetpack resolve.

Hello,
I’ve been using WordPress for about a year now and recently decided to purchase my domain name on WordPress. That change resulted in the number of Facebook share counts being reset to 0 on individual blog posts. So far, I’ve found this thread helpful. After creating custom_og_url on individual posts, the Facebook Sharing Debugger shows the previous number of likes/shares for the canonical url. However, on WordPress, the count still shows 0 shares.
After reading this thread, I’m wondering if the issue might be that I did not exempt the Facebook crawler from redirect(?) Can you walk me through the steps to complete this exemption? Or might there be another reason that the debugger is showing the number of shares but WordPress is not?

Thank you!!