I was having trouble getting Facebook “Likes” and Facebook “Shares” to properly pickup my page summaries any time someone would “Like” or “Share” a page.  Instead of picking up the first few sentences of text from the page, Facebook was picking up my Adsense code – showing (Adsense code) jibberish on people’s Facebook Wall any time they shared one of my pages.  Facebook was also picking up the wrong images to display with the “Share”.

After 3 minutes of research and by using the Facebook Debugger Tool (VERY helpful!) I found that the Facebook crawler was confused by my lack of Open Graph (OG:) Meta tags.  I was using the Facebook Social Drupal Module but it only provides the bare minimum Open Graph meta tags for Shares and Facebook “Likes”.

For getting these additional Facebook meta tags, I found the Drupal Open Graph Meta Tags Module.

This module makes it easy to add Open Graph meta tags (http://opengraphprotocol.org/) to a node to enable it to be come a “rich” social object. For instance, Facebook uses this information to work out how to preview shared content in a user’s Facebook profile (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/share).

This module makes it easy to select the image thumbnail used to represent the node (used by Facebook when constructing a preview). The editor is shown a list of thumbnails of all images associated with the node (both as fields as well as images embedded within the node’s body content).

If need be, meta tags can be restricted to specific content types and access to administering and editing meta tags can be restricted by role using Drupal’s built-in permissions system.

After getting your Open Graph meta tags configured, you may notice that when Sharing or Like-ing pages, Facebook is still not seeing your tags – this is because the Facebook crawler has the old page cached.  You can force the Facebook crawler to re-crawl your page and update it’s cache by using the Facebook Debugger Tool.  Just enter the URL and hit the DEBUG button, and the Facebook crawler / bot will recrawl your page and update the Facebook cache.