Topic-icon Share and Like counts all disappeared -- all zero now.

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I noticed the Share and Like counts on my articles have all turned to zero. I went into the Autotune Facebook App Configuration and noticed the Site URL was to an old staging site. I changed the Site URL to the correct one, but that did not bring the counts back.

The only other thing I can think of that I changed was adding a non-www redirect command in the .htaccess file for the site.

Any ideas why all the counts turned to zero?

Thanks.
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10 years 10 months ago #54355 by alzander
All social networks tie the share counts to a specific URL. If you've changed the URL for your content, then the share count will not follow to the new URL. There's no way to force the old like count to a new URL. Otherwise, that could be heavily abused by getting users to Like one page and then changing their Like's to an unrelated URL.

We always recommend using either www or non-www for your content so that your share counts are spread between the two variations. The only thing you may want to try now is to use the "Force Scheme" setting in JFBConnect to make all of your share URLs for www or non-www. That may restore your old Like count, but will also cause all shares to use the 'wrong' URL (either www or non-www).

I hope that helps explain, but if you need anything else, please let us know.

Thanks,
Alex
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10 years 10 months ago #54361 by rapmag1
I just realized I also changed the .htaccess file to remove the "index.php" from all URLs. I suppose this would remove all counts as well.

I tried adding the index.php back to the URLs, but that did not bring back counts either. I then tried reversing the non-www redirect, but again no luck. I'm thinking they are simply lost counts at this point.

The Force Scheme setting appears to only allow forcing http:// or https://, not www or non-www.

Lesson learned. Thanks for the input, Alex. It was helpful.
jv
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Support Specialist
10 years 10 months ago #54367 by alzander
The Likes don't just go away. If you know the specific URLs you used to use, you can enter them into the Facebook Debug tool . That can show you the Like count for a specific page so you can find the variant quickly. Even then though, unless you want to go back to that old URL completely, the only option is to setup the share buttons to share the old URL and do a redirect to the new URL. That should show the right count, but will also promote the incorrect URL.

I hope that helps, but if you need anything else, just let us know.

Thanks,
Alex
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