Earlier this week, we were telling you about the latest Facebook Link Preview update, which now prevents you from editing metadata in your posts, and we have disabled this feature in Loomly as well.
All over the web, social media managers have been expressing their frustration with this Facebook update — although in fairness many also understand what’s at stake here — which led to new developments.
Facebook since announced Link Ownership, a new, interesting & official feature allowing major publishers to customize metadata in link previews for URLs from their own domain.
In parallel, developer Michael Kramers came up with Pretty Links, a free, simple online tool that lets you customize Link Previews for Facebook posts:
How does it work? According to Pretty Links’ website:
Very simple – Pretty Links acts as middleman between your webpage and the Facebook crawler. While it delivers your preferred sharing preview to Facebook, it redirects all other traffic to the webpage (technically, it’s a 301 Permament Redirect, for those concerned with SEO).
A word of caution: while we do believe Pretty Links is an interesting hack from a technical point of view, it remains nonetheless a hack, working around a new official Facebook policy, which may not be compliant with Facebook’s current / upcoming terms of services. Therefore, we cannot endorse Pretty Links and we highly recommend prudence when sharing customized link previews to Facebook.
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