The Facebook Crawler

Having attempted to promote a local event by getting Facebook users to visit a (my) website by clicking on a link that a Facebook user had placed on their page.

The link was sent in emails to those that were known Facebook users and the link was most probably added to thier page/post by copy and pasting from the email. On further analysis of this technique it is obvious that it was not going to work!

I was interested to see a visit in my server logs by this crawler:

• facebookexternalhit/1.1

The Facebook Crawler is a method by which Facebook determines how its users refer to other web resources and leverages their attempts to maximize their position.

What the Facebook Developers say:

This is another example of trying to do something that sounds straight-forward only to find that there are processes already in place to handle that situation.

In trying to promote an event with the knowledge of the fact that a link was placed on Facebook I find out about Link Shims and now a crawler (search engine robot) that looks for information on links that its users place in their posts.

Why this is not going work

While the premise of the crawler sounds like a good idea it is unlikely that Facebook will allow their platform to promote your website and Facebook will add a "shim link" to any link that is displayed on one of their users pages.

This Shim Link may contain information about your website but a modal dialog will still be displayed (I am presuming) when a Facebook user clicks the link.