Changing Facebook meta tag Content Attribute using JQuery

Question

I want to know how can I use JQuery in order to replace the content attribute of my Facebook meta tags.

I searched StackOverflow and what I've found was this example:

$("meta[property=og:title]").attr("content", title);
$("meta[property=og:url]").attr("content", url);

In my code I have the following meta tags:

<meta property="og:title" content="some content"/>
<meta property="og:url" content="some content"/>
<meta property="og:site_name" content="some content"/>

When I run the function that should change the content for the 'title' and 'url' variables, the change doesn't take place. The same values for the 'content' still remains the same.

I want to know how, if it's possible, to use JQuery to change the value of Facebook's meta tags.

Answer 1

This is how it worked for me:

$('meta[name=og\\:url]').attr('content', newVideoUrl);

note the double backslash, without it Jquery will fail with an error.

Answer 2

It is definitely possible to change meta tags using jQuery, but I don't think that's going to accomplish what you want since the meta tags are pulled by the FB scraper. The FB scraper goes out and scrapes your page to read the meta tags.

Editing Meta Tags

You can update the attributes of your page by updating your page's tags. Note that og:title and og:type are only editable initially - after your page receives 50 likes the title becomes fixed, and after your page receives 10,000 likes the type becomes fixed. These properties are fixed to avoid surprising users who have liked the page already. Changing the title or type tags after these limits are reached does nothing, your page retains the original title and type.

For the changes to be reflected on Facebook, you must force your page to be scraped. The page is scraped when an admin for the page clicks the Like button or when the URL is entered into the Facebook URL Linter. You can programmatically force your page to be scraped by cURL'ing the linter. For example ...

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/

Answer 3

The Facebook scraper doesn't execute JavaScript.

So using Javascript to modify the metatags in order to show different share content won't work.

You'd need to use serverside code to write them out as needed in the HTML source.