"Publicize" on Google doesn't share image from post

  • Unknown's avatar
    alydonnelly · Member ·

    I am publicizing my WordPress blog posts on Google+ and have noticed that it doesn’t carry over a picture from the post, but one from the sidebar widgets, and it’s always the same one. My G+ profile is now a series of the same photo over and over again with different headings for the blog post title. I’m not sure how to change this, or if I even can. Why did that particular picture get chosen? I include unique pictures in each new post, so why don’t those get used?

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    omkarbhagat · Member ·

    Hi there,

    While I cannot answer this post completely, I’ll share two URL debugger links which helps to update the images/content associated with the URL.

    1) Facebook – http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug
    2) Google – https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool

    I’ll explain this with an example –

    1) After publishing a post, I copy paste the link in Facebook timeline
    2) The image from the post is fetched incorrectly
    3) I go to Facebook debugger, paste link there and debug
    4) I go back to my Facebook timeline and paste the link
    5) The right image is fetched this time

    I hope this helps to add info to this post in some way :)

  • Unknown's avatar
    alydonnelly · Member ·

    Hi omkarbhagat,

    Thanks for this, but if I have to go through 5 steps to correct a picture, I can just post the link to G+ manually and choose my own picture to associate with it. The idea behind Publicizing directly is that it’s done automatically for me and I don’t have to manually share across all my social media. If I can’t get it to work that way, I guess I’ll just have to stop using that function for G+ :(

  • Unknown's avatar
    omkarbhagat · Member ·

    @alydonnelly,

    I totally understand that it is not practical to correct the picture on every post. But I wanted to share a way to fix it.

    I’ll still dig and see what I can find.

    I’ll also add the modlook tag to this thread so that someone from the staff will look into this :)

  • Unknown's avatar
    alydonnelly · Member ·

    Thank you! =)

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    What happens is that other services cache the images associated with a certain link, but sometimes their system gets confused and start using the same image for other links instead of checking if there’s a different image for the new link.

    In Facebook’s case, you can flush their cache by running the link to the post through the debugger that @omkarbhagat linked to for you. You shouldn’t have to do that for every post, but when you notice a post is sharing with the wrong image, that’s how you fix it.

    Google+ has no similar tool. The structured data testing tool linked to above just shows the structured data in your site headers that we send to Google, but there’s no way to flush the cache for links shared on Google+. The only thing I can suggest that might work is to completely disconnect Google+, meaning you disconnect it both in My Site ->Sharing AND in Connected Apps in your Google account settings, and then you make a new connection.

    You can also try contacting Google Support and ask them to clear the sharing cache for your site’s URL, but I have no idea if they actually do anything like that.

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