Why is the Facebook scraper ignoring OG tags?

Question

It's only happening on a handful of URLs. For example:

https://gateless.com/articles/generate-leads/happy-thanksgiving-to-all-115-million-american-households

Facebook Debugger:

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/sharing/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fgateless.com%2Farticles%2Fgenerate-leads%2Fhappy-thanksgiving-to-all-115-million-american-households

But this one works great:

https://gateless.com/articles/generate-leads/your-blueprint-for-converting-inbound-leads

Facebook Debugger:

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/sharing/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fgateless.com%2Farticles%2Fgenerate-leads%2Fyour-blueprint-for-converting-inbound-leads

Via DNS, this site is only accessible within the US.

Answer 1

It was the SSL certificate. We reissued one from within AWS and now the URLs scrape OK. Don't buy SSL certificates from GeoTrust.

Answer 2

The articles are throwing error:

This site can’t be reached

gateless.com’s server DNS address could not be found.

Since your site is inaccessible, the crawler is unable to fetch the data for og tags.

The second URL seems to be working as it is showing cached data.

You can click on "See exactly what our scraper sees for your URL" in the Debugger to see what content is being scraped.

In this case, the page is blank which is a good indication that the crawler is unable to see the content or your page is not returning the correct data that the crawler expects.