In today’s digital world, small businesses must maintain a strong online presence to reach new customers, communicate with their audience, and share their services or products. One of the critical ways businesses can leverage online platforms is through social media, and for many, Facebook remains a cornerstone of their social media strategy. When integrating Facebook into a business’s website, there is a particular mechanism at work behind the scenes, often unnoticed by users, but crucial for functionality: the Facebookexternalhit robot.
In this post, we’ll explore what the Facebookexternalhit robot is, how it works, and how small businesses can ensure that it enhances their website’s interaction with Facebook without causing any potential issues.
The Facebookexternalhit robot, or simply “Facebookexternalhit,” is a web crawler used by Facebook to fetch and retrieve data from websites. This process typically occurs when users share a link from a website on Facebook or Messenger. Facebookexternalhit is responsible for collecting the meta information from the webpage, such as the title, description, and image. This information is then displayed as a “link preview” whenever someone shares the link in a post or message.
For small businesses, these previews are often the first thing a potential customer sees when someone shares their website on Facebook. This makes it essential to optimise the information that Facebookexternalhit retrieves to create an appealing and accurate preview.
When someone pastes a link into Facebook, the platform automatically sends a request to that website to gather the necessary data. This request is made by Facebook’s crawler, Facebookexternalhit, which looks for specific Open Graph tags in the website’s HTML code. These tags are like snippets of information designed to tell Facebook what to display in the link preview. They typically include the following:
og:title): The headline or name of the webpage.og:description): A brief summary of the content on the page.og:image): The primary image to be displayed alongside the link.og:url): The canonical URL of the page.If a website doesn’t have these tags, Facebookexternalhit tries to generate the information automatically by pulling general information from the page. This may not always lead to an optimal result, and the preview might end up looking unprofessional or incomplete, which could deter clicks.
Small businesses often rely on word-of-mouth and organic sharing as part of their marketing efforts. When someone shares a link to a business’s website on Facebook, it represents an opportunity for that business to make a positive first impression. If the preview is unappealing or misrepresents the website’s content, it may discourage people from clicking through.
A well-optimised preview can enhance the website’s credibility, increase traffic, and potentially generate leads. On the other hand, if the link preview is poorly formatted or displays irrelevant images or text, the business may lose a chance to attract new customers.
To ensure that your website works smoothly with Facebookexternalhit, you need to optimise your site’s metadata, particularly the Open Graph (OG) tags. Here’s how to go about it:
<head> section of your webpage’s code and should really be within the first 1Mb of data read on the page (which means the first 1 million characters or so) .For example:
<meta property="og:title" content="Your Business Title">
<meta property="og:description" content="A brief description of your services or products.">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://yourwebsite.com/image.jpg">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://yourwebsite.com/page-url">
Including these tags ensures that Facebookexternalhit knows exactly what information to display, which helps create a more professional and enticing link preview
While Facebookexternalhit is generally reliable, there are a few issues that small businesses may encounter when trying to optimise their website for it:
The Facebookexternalhit robot plays a vital role in how your business’s website is represented on Facebook. For small businesses, it’s essential to get this right, as poorly optimised previews can lead to missed opportunities. By taking the time to set up and test Open Graph tags, choose the right images, and monitor performance, you can ensure that your website looks its best whenever it’s shared, helping to drive traffic and engage potential customers.