Why is Publer not generating a link preview?
Link Scrapers
Sometimes certain links will not work properly and Publer will not be able to generate the preview of those links, for a number of reasons. Publer relies on two scrapers for generating the link previews.
Internal tool
The first one is internally built by us using the following agent.
facebookplatform/1.0 (+http://developers.facebook.com)
The IP is dynamic as we rely on proxies to prevent our scraper from getting accidentally blocked. Thus, it's not possible to whitelist based on IP.
Link Preview tool
On the other hand, if our scraper fails, we then rely on a 3rd party app to generate link previews:
https://www.linkpreview.net/
If the Link Preview tool also fails, we then show a blank live preview. Unfortunately, there is not much that we can do in this case, given the issue is related to the link.
Note: It's recommended that you check if your link has the necessary meta tags, to ensure that it will be loaded properly on Publer and shared with the respective thumbnail on the social networks. Learn more about how you can do that here.
Headless Browser
We use our own scraper, a third-party scraper, and even a headless browser to fetch link previews.
A headless browser is a web browser without a graphical user interface. Headless browsers are prevalent in web scraping because they can help you render JavaScript or programmatically behave like a human user to avoid blocking.
Link Preview Not Generating
1. Your website settings are not allowing it.
If your website is not allowing it due to hot-linking issues, it will look like the image below:
You have to turn-off/disable image hot-linking protection.
To turn-off or disable hot-lining for Publer, you can follow this guide here.
Alternatively, you have to whitelist the "publer.io" domain.
Keep in mind that not seeing the link preview won't cause any issues when posting to social networks. The only issue is that you can't visualize the preview in Publer.
2. The respective OG Meta Tags are missing.
If there are no proper OG Image Meta Tags, it will look like the image below:
Open Graph meta tags are snippets of code that control how URLs are displayed when shared on social media.
They’re part of the Open Graph protocol and are used by many social media sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
You can find them in the <head> section of a webpage. Any tags with "og:" before a property name are Open Graph tags.
Learn more about the OG meta tags and how to use them here.
Note: It's recommended that you check if your link has the necessary meta tags, to ensure that it will be loaded properly on Publer and shared with the respective thumbnail on the social networks. Learn more about how you can do that here.
3. The website has very strict policies on who can access it.
Even with OG meta tags set up, tools such as Publer will not be able to scrape metadata from your site if your website has very strict policies on who can access it.
We recommend slightly adjusting the security settings of your website to allow for web scraping.
Written by: Brikena Cani
Updated on: 17/12/2024
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