e description. I had too much free time on my hands, so I ran some some tests and this is what I found out.
I. Where does Facebook get the description?
Facebook pulls the description from the following sources, in this order:
First it looks for a description meta tag, and uses the content as description.
If there is no description meta tag found, Facebook looks for the first
(paragraph) tag that contains at least 120 characters. (Do you know why comments and blog description are picked as description? Because each of them is enclosed with a p tag, that’s why).
If none of the above is available, it leaves the description spot blank.
According to Facebook, it scrapes your page every 24 hours to ensure the description (and other share data) are up to date. However, you can manually refresh it by entering the post URL into the Facebook URL Linter.
II. What can you do to fix this?
You can do one of the followings to solve the problem:
Add description meta tag to post pages.
But this a bad idea (for a Blogger blog). DON’T CHOOSE THIS METHOD! I’m not going to explain the whys here. You can read my previous post on description meta tag for the explanation.
Update Mar 2011: As it turns out Blogger now provides a (unique) snippet for each blog post, which in turn can be used as meta description. See below for instructions.
Add a
tag to your posts.
The absence of
tags in Blogger post is the root of the problem in my opinion. Luckily you can add the tag easily enough. I explain it below.
III. How to add post snippet description meta tag
The correct place for adding a description meta tag is in the section of your template. However in this case you have to add it to the blog post widget template since the post snippet data tag only works when within the widget template. So if you don’t mind the invalid markup (due to meta tag outside the head), here’s how:
Go to Dashboard > Design > Edit HTML.
Back up your template.
Tick the Expand Widget Templates check box on top right of the HTML window.
Look for the following line in your HTML code:
Add the code below
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