Sharing

How to Change the Metadata for an Existing Link

Overview

Link metadata tends to change infrequently, so the Facebook crawler conserves resources by updating your link metadata automatically every 30 days. Therefore, it can take as much as 30 days for your link details to update after a change. You can force a refresh using the Sharing Debugger or with a Graph API call (described below).

Link metadata properties can be changed as often as you like with a few exceptions:

  • Title: This can be changed until it has 50 user interactions (ex. likes, shares, comments) associated with it. Once it has passed that threshold, the title cannot be changed.
  • Type: A link's object type can't be changed once the link is used in a story. For more information about object types, see Open Graph Reference and scroll down to Object Types.

When updating an image for a link, use a different image URL so that cached versions of the image aren't used. For more information, see Updating Images.

Step-by-Step Instructions

The following instructions describe how to use a Graph API call to update the link metadata for your page using the Graph API.

  1. Update the og:* meta tags on your page.
  2. Make a Graph API call using this endpoint, replacing "{your_url}" with the URL for the link you are updating. The URL must be encoded so that it doesn't interfere with the scrape parameter.
    3. POST /?id={your_url}&scrape=true

Once the metadata has been updated, it will be used for all new shares of your link. If you've already shared the link, it will continue to display the old data. To learn how to refresh existing shares, see Refreshing Shared Links.