Well after a week of searching, I found the fix. You have to block W3 Total Cache from serving cached pages to Facebook’s bot/crawler. Make sure to reject these user agents in the “page cache” tab in W3 Total Cache:
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facebookexternalhit
FacebookExternalHit/1.1
FacebookExternalHit/1.0
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This will block W3 Total Cache from sending cached pages to Facebook. This solved my issue with thumbnails and descriptions.
I just did some more reading, and realized I have no idea what I was talking about.
I’ll have to read up a little more on this. If anyone has a good, fast way to “parallelize downloads across hostnames” I’d appreciate a tip in the right direction.
Thanks,
Tim