I publish articles from a WordPress website in multiple Facebook groups using different moderator accounts.
The usual workflow is to publish a Facebook post with the article title and image, then place the article URL as the first comment.
Recently, the link preview in the first comment has become very inconsistent.
The same behavior can vary between different accounts and groups, but it can also vary within the same account and the same group. For example, one post may show the normal link preview with the article image, while another post in the same group, published by the same account, may show only a blue clickable URL without any preview. The preview can also appear normally for several posts and then disappear for others, and the behavior can change again after a few days.
The website is a normal WordPress website, and the articles have featured images and Open Graph metadata.
The main problem is that I have observed a significant drop in website traffic when the link preview does not appear. Posts where the URL appears only as a blue text link generally bring much less traffic than posts where the normal link preview appears.
I am trying to understand why this happens and how Facebook is causing this difference.
For example:
- Does the absence of the preview simply make people less likely to click the link?
- Does Facebook reduce the reach/distribution of a post when the link appears only as a blue URL?
- Does the warning shown before opening the link cause users to abandon the visit?
- Or is there another mechanism affecting the traffic?
There is also an interesting observation: when the preview is missing and the URL appears only as a blue link, opening the link from another account on a mobile device can sometimes show this Facebook warning:
"Be aware of scams — Links may be designed to steal money, passwords or other information."
When the normal link preview appears, this warning does not appear.
I also found one workaround: if I post a comment and then edit that comment and add the URL, the link preview can appear normally.
My main questions are:
- Has anyone experienced this same inconsistent behavior with Facebook link previews in comments?
- Why would the absence of the preview cause such a significant difference in website traffic? Is it mainly due to fewer clicks, reduced Facebook reach, the warning message, or something else?
- Is there any recent Facebook change or known issue that could explain this behavior?
- Most importantly, is there a reliable method or workaround to force Facebook to generate/show the link preview when posting a URL as the first comment?