Came across this handy little trick the other day to refresh the Facebook cache of your web page or blog post. We all know that when you paste a link into the  status box on your Facebook page it goes away and grabs information from the URL, the title, summary and one or more images that you can then select to use as the thumbnail for your Facebook post.

But what happens if you update the blog post or web page? For example, I wrote a blog post, and pasted the URL into Facebook. Before I clicked the Post button I realised I had not added an image to the blog entry. So I went back and uploaded an image, then returned to Facebook and paste the URL again. Except Facebook didn’t show the new image.

The problem is Facebook caches the URL – so the second and subsequent time you paste the URL it is not retrieving a fresh copy, simply relying on the previously scraped information.

The quick way around this is to force Facebook to scrape the URL again. Go to the Facebook Debugger page,  paste in your URL and click the Debug button.

The Facebook Debugger page can be used to force a cache refresh.

Then go back to your Facebook status update and paste the URL again there. Facebook should now display the latest version of the URL.