Update: A good friend of mine from a certain celebrity gossip site sent me what appears to be a solution this morning. Facebook has posted what appears to be a temporary fix that patches the problem for now. The fix is pretty simple. Put the following code in your header (with proper modifications). Let me know if this fixes your problem.
<div id="fb-root"></div>
<script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js"></script>
<script>
FB.init({
appId : 'YOUR APP ID',
channelUrl : 'http://example.com/channel.html' // custom channel
});
</script>
Update: The other day I noticed that somehow Joost de Valk of Yoast has fixed the ?fb_xd_fragment= issue. I emailed him and he mentioned that he’s using a plugin that is stripping the URL of the string, but that the plugin isn’t publicly available…yet…
This last week I was going through my analytics. Just the other day, I put together a post on how an user could use Google Analytics to track the like button. And I’m pretty happy about that. But what I found in my analytics is inexcusable. Just under 5% of SpiderMarket’s traffic (nearly 100 people everyday) are being diverted from the page they are trying to get to, to a page that shows up as blank. And it seems like I’m not the only one having this problem.
Just google the appendage. You will see that Google has so far indexed over 50,000 pages with the “?fb_xd_fragment=” at the end. These pages resolve to a blank, codeless page.
The most interesting thing of it is, if you look at the URLs affected, it’s not just little guys like you and me. It’s big sites that you’ve heard of.
The common thread here is that none of these sites use the rel canonical tag. It seems like that has done well to keep the fragmented sections out of the index for most sites. But for people like me, the loss in traffic is significant.
What’s more is, it appears that facebook developers have been made aware of the problem, but they aren’t working quickly to fix it. So, for the time being, until this little problem is fixed, I’ve removed facebook’s like button from my sites.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Josh – try, the bug is still outstanding and has been assigned a P5 priority, the least important. Check this blog post: it suggests ways to fix it: http://www.searchmarketingman.com/2010/09/how-to-fix-like-button-bug.html
Stephane
@Stephane, you’re right. The priority is the lowest, and the bug is still outstanding. But I don’t think those things in that post are really workarounds. The problem here is the functionality of the site. If I use the iframe version, then I might as well just use the share button (which I trust far more). Removing the fb_xd_fragment= from webmaster tools doesn’t solve the problem of people coming to a page that doesn’t load.
Frankly, since FB seems to not care about this issue, as a form of protest, I’m of the opinion that the workaround is to not put a like button on your page until facebook fixes it.
We have written up a little tutorial on how to fix the problem: http://www.siliconbeachtraining.co.uk/free-resources/strange-code-google-analytics-training/
this will fix both the duplicate content problem and the Google Analytics problem
I have seen that “solution” listed all over. How does that solve the problem though? First of all, there almost never going to be a duplicate content issue that is caused by this, and second, it doesn’t prevent people from ending up on a blank page. It’s really not a solution at all.
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