Comment on WordPress Social Network Theme by SEO Dave.

WordPress Promotion Theme I’m aware of an issue with the Facebook like button fb_xd_fragment bug that’s apparently been an on going bug issue with the Facebook default Like button code for years.

This is a bug in the Facebook coding, not Stallion. I stumbled upon the fb_xd_fragment issue about a week ago on one of my wife’s sites and have been looking for a fix (so far nothing I can put into Stallion).

On my wife’s site there was a frame redirection script (WordPress plugin) running because it’s a photo blog and with photo blogs you get a lot of traffic directly to the image via Google images (the visitor doesn’t actually visit the site). The script forces a page out of a frame and basically redirects them to the site where they get AdSense ads etc… Have to admit the plugin didn’t make any obvious difference to the amount of AdSense clicks.

When I updated the site from Talian to Stallion it would not load a page in Internet Explorer and gave a URL with fb_xd_fragment with in it. Basically would load correctly then reload a URL with the Facebook link code within it and the page would be blank.

Didn’t take long to find info on the Facebook bug, what was happening is there was an interaction between the Facebook iframe code and the WordPress plugin, but only in IE. I disabled the plugin, problem solved.

I’ve updated about 60 domains to Stallion and this is the only time I’ve found this bug and no one else (until now :-)) has reported an issue like this.

If I can’t find a fix (not looking good as I can’t change Facebook’s buggy code on their servers) I’ll be adding a warning to the Promotions Options page about the bug. If a site trips the bug would be a case of either disabling the like button or find what’s causing the bug to occur and remove it.

To test your site for the bug load a post with the like button on in Internet Explorer or check your server logs for pages with fb_xd_fragment within them. I read it doesn’t affect pages that have been liked, so make sure it’s a post which hasn’t been liked already.

This shouldn’t damage a WordPress sites search engine rankings since WordPress has built in canonical URL redirection. Basically these broken URLs if read by Google etc… will be treated as the original page and redirect the benefit. Not suggesting this should be ignored since your visitors running Internet Explorer get a blank page! Once fixed either by finding what’s interacting with the Facebook code or turning the Facebook Like button off there will be no SEO damage.

The Facebook referrer views is another issue. I see it as well on my sites, it appears to be occasionally a page double loads and uses the FaceBook Like URL as the referrer. I’ve looked into it and couldn’t find a reason for this to occur, other have the same issue.

Basically the default Facebook Like button code is poorly written! Facebook can send a fair amount of traffic to some types of site, I’ve got pages with over 500 Likes and wouldn’t want to remove the like buttons, so stuck with buggy code I’m afraid.

David