Wrong (old?) content to share

Linkedin fetches this content from the Open Graph Meta Tags present in the HTML source of your site. If it’s picking old content it means you have updated the old meta tags at your site. It will take Linkedin some time to pick the new content until its crawlers fetch it from your site. I suggest you wait 24 hours for this.

Thank you for your message.

I don’t think that what you described is the issue here. To support my theory, when I create a new page, like this instant, add “test123” as text to the page, and share the page using the LinkedIn button, I see the “test123” in the proposed LinkedIn post window. When I view the source of the page, I see the “test123” in the OG meta data.

I then cancel the post and change the text on my page to “test456” and again use the LinkedIn post button. The same “test123” is shown in the post preview window. Viewing the OG tags of the page shows the adjusted meta data.

In this particular scenario, there hasn’t been a single moment during which LinkedIn could have crawled my page.

In other words, I believe that the original text (test123) is somehow stored somewhere (in a database perhaps?) and that it is not the meta tags that get pulled (given the fact that they have clearly changed after changing the text test123 to test456), but that the information comes from someplace else.

Any other ideas?

When you published a new post, Linkedin crawlers do not know that there is a new one at your site. So, the content of OG meta will be shown in the sharer. Crawler crawls your website within a certain period (say every 24 hours) and fetches content of the OG meta in your web pages to save it in the OG meta cache and the same appears in the Linkedin sharer window.

In the case of your old web page you mentioned in your original post, the OG meta tags would be having a different content than what these have now. Linkedin crawler must have stored that in the OG Meta cache when it crawled your website last time. The content of OG Meta tags changed after that (may be you installed a new plugin for this) and now you should wait till crawler carwls your site again and updates the OG Meta cache.

Thank you for your reply! I think I get it now. Nevertheless, I am in the situation that it feels off to post that particular page to LinkedIn, knowing that the content doesn’t match the content on the actual page. The whole idea is to get people to read what’s on the actual page, not present them with another text that they won’t find on the page itself…

Isn’t there any other way to somehow ‘clear’ the ‘cached’ content? I mean, is the only option for me to post content to LinkedIn and then wait and hope that it will update on its own?

Thanks!

Yes, we don’t have any option but to wait because Linkedin doesn’t have any tool that allow us to clear the OG Meta Tags cache.

Just to give you a heads-up: LinkedIn DOES have a tool to clear the OG Meta Tags cache.

It’s called the LinkedIn Post Inspector (https://www.linkedin.com/post-inspector/).

I entered the url of the page that was giving me trouble and after ‘inspection’, it now posts the correct content to LinkedIn.

So, problem solved and a free tip for users of the otherwise excellent plugin you’ve provided!

Oh. Did not know Linkedin have such a tool. Thanks for the heads up ??