News Indexing

Best Practices

General Recommendations

  • Index an article as soon as it is published on your website.
  • Update an article when the article changes.
  • Add your article to the denylist when the article is unpublished or added to the index by mistake.
  • Be sure your URLs are available to the Facebook Webcrawler so that it can gather titles, descriptions, and thumbnail for each article.
  • If you are using test article URLs from your developer environment, you must:
    • Verify your development domain in your Business Manager.
    • Only use your production URLs once you change the scope for an article to production, scopes="news_tab".
  • Use the Facebook Sharing Debugger tool to test the availability of your article URLs.
  • Implement logging that includes:
    • API call made
    • Responses with headers
    • Timestamp when call made

    • Sample Log

Mitigation Tactics for Invalid Access Tokens

To lower the risk of API calls failing when a token unexpectedly becomes invalid, we recommend the following:

  • create a script to alert you of calls failing due to invalidated tokens
  • investigate why the token is no longer valid

Rating Limiting

To avoid app rate limiting, we recommend the following:

  • Use your app for News Indexing API only. This reduces the possibility that News API calls are affected by factors, such as rate limits, from other API requests.
  • Process calls sequentially.
  • Avoid duplicated, outdated, or parallel calls.