I fixed it! Back to my proper share count in Facebook (I lost the 5 shares in the interim unavoidably though). Here’s how I solved it, in case others find this thread.
First, I queried Facebook’s API directly with the following special links. Here I discovered that Facebook is treating the “http” and “https” versions of my site as separate entities within their sharing “graph”:
http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?method=links.getStats&urls=http://savebees.org
http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?method=links.getStats&urls=https://savebees.org
I took a quick refresher on Open Graph tags, and installed this plugin: “Facebook Open Graph, Google+ and Twitter Card Tags (1.5.2)” I did this because I found out that what I wanted was to get an “og:url” meta tag on my page, which Facebook (and other sharing networks) see as the canonical URL for a given page. The deal is that one wants the og:url tag to point to the well-shared version of one’s site (in my case the “http” version). Then one can let the 301 redirect in the .htaccess (which sends all http requests to https) do its thing.
I then changed my WordPress General Settings back for WordPress URL and Site Address URL to “http” rather than “https”, because that’s what the plugin uses to set the link in the meta tag “og:url”. I had originally changed them to “https” because I wanted to make it easy on myself in the future when uploading images in posts/pages for those image sources to be https rather than http (to avoid those mixed-content security messages). Well, I’ll just edit those in the source of future posts manually until I find another way to set the “og:url” tag separately from modifying the General Settings in WordPress. For now, I’m just happy to have my many FB shares back!
Odd that Twitter didn’t have this issue with its share count (more sensibly seeing the “http” and “https” versions of my site as one and the same sharing object). It irritates me to change the way I wish to do something simply for Facebook. If only I’d setup my site to be https at the very beginning! For now this works though, and I’m happy to move onto other things. If anyone has a better suggestion, feel free to post it 🙂
Never mind somehow Facebook (their actual API or graph or whatever) has equalized the counts to 14 between http and https, losing all my many years worth of shares, almost 600 🙁 Oddly, when I checked the links above other day (querying their graph), the shares had flipped, showing 594 on https versus 14 on http (before it was the other way around, and I triple-checked this to make sure I wasn’t going nuts). Too bad they equalized with my lowest count rather than highest, I’m so unhappy about losing so many years’ worth of shares data, but there’s no support of course at Facebook for such a case, and I haven’t read anywhere else on the web of something like this happening. It strikes me as a database error on their part, as for all my other sites there are still more shares on http rather than https. Why they flipped, and then why my share count was mysteriously reset after so many years, I’ve no idea 🙁
I’m sorry to hear about the trouble! I’m afraid we don’t have control over the counts: they come directly from Facebook, and Facebook reports 12 shares for that page at the moment:
http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?method=links.getStats&urls=https://savebees.org
If you think it should report more shares, I’d suggest reporting the bug here:
https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/trending/
I hope this helps to at least clear things up! Please let me know if you have any other questions.
Thank you so much for posting a reply to this thread. I wish I could report the bug to Facebook, because it’s odd (not to mention embarrassing) to have lost close to 600 shares built up over years!
Unfortunately I cannot appear to report the bug at the link you provided without a Facebook account. I’ve never been on Facebook, but people still shared my website link, hence my reasonable share count (before it mysteriously disappeared right around October 9th-ish).
I suppose there’s nothing to be done, other than record my experience here, in case it helps someone else to know that other sites suddenly lose share counts from years of data overnight with Facebook 🙁
You’re welcome! Please let us know if you have any other questions.
This article might be of use http://goo.gl/cUapxu
