Facebook blocks links to your site as Abusive or Spammy
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Author:
Administrator Account |
Posted:
4/13/2012 |
Views:
22134
Facebook is an excellent way to spread the word about any consumer oriented business (restaurants, retail, services, online stores, ...). Whenever we build a consumer oriented site, we do our best to consider the best ways to leverage Facebook and other social media to ensure our clients get the best possible return from their website.
One day, one of my clients noticed that when he tried to click on a link to his site through Facebook, the link was blocked with the following message:
The link you are trying to visit has been reported as abusive by Facebook users. To learn more about staying safe on the internet, visit Facebook's Security Page. Please also read the Wikipedia articles on malware and phishing.
It took us quite a bit of digging to figure out how to best address this and so I'm hoping I can make this process easier for others...
The first thing you'll want to do is to go to this page,
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug. On that page you can paste your URL and click the Debug button and Facebook will run a test on the page and report any problems it finds.
When running the debug tool, it might return the following message:
Could not scrape URL because it has been blocked
If you get that, you can request Facebook to to review your page for removal from blocking by going here:
https://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=block_appeal
In our case, the main issue was that we were doing a redirect that Facebook didn't like. We were including a referral id in the link and the code that checked for the referral id would redirect to the site root if it found one. Removing that redirect is what fixed our main issue. We also added a couple additional Open Graph meta tags that were recommended by the Debug tool.
Hope this helps someone else. Happy Coding!