Remove Facebook SEO meta tags entirely

Questions
1

I’m looking to create a video player page in bubble. I want to make the facebook SEO meta tags to render render as videos in facebook rather than links. It seems the “built-in” facebook SEO meta tags make all links render as webpages. I don’t see a way to change, disable, or supersede the default fb meta tags that bubble provides. I had read @emmanuel mention the order in which the meta tags are loaded might be changeable in a previous post back in 2016–although it was slightly a different context. I’m wondering if the same applies here.

When I put my page’s bubble url into the facebook ‘sharing debugger’ this is what the debugger returns

og:url `https://my.speechbooth.com/version-test/play/1619279635806x272638164584824160
og:type website
og:title Play

This is not what I want. I want og:video to be my recognized tag type

When we take a look at the meta tags in the rendered page HTML, you can see the bubble-generated fb tags print first. Any subsequent fb meta tags that are added in the page header load afterwards and are ignored.

 <meta charset="utf-8" />
 <meta name="referrer" content="origin" />
 <meta name="fragment" content="!" />
 <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" />
 <meta property="og:site_name" content="SpeechBooth" />
 <meta name="twitter:site_name" content="SpeechBooth" />
 <meta property="og:url" content="https://mybubbleapp.com/version-test/play/1619279635806x272638924584824160" />
 <meta property="og:type" content="website" />
 <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0" />


 <meta property="og:video" content="https://www.myvideohost.com/s/mdayr023uycl5pp/my_movie.mov" />
 <meta property="og:video:secure_url" content="https://www.myvideohost.com/s/mdayr023uycl5pp/my_movie.mov" />
 <meta property="og:video:type" content="video/mp4" />
 <meta property="og:video:height" content="1080" />
 <meta property="og:video:width" content="1920" />
 <meta property="og:image" content="https://s3.amazonaws.com/appforest_uf/f161927923199x838232971426941400/get_thumbnail_v2" />
 <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes" />

Every tag with property og:video is ignored. Everything before cannot be disabled. Is there a solution to this?

2

Bumping this thread. Does anyone know if there is a way to disable the @Bubble built in facebook meta tags? The facebook meta tags HTML seems to be hardcoded into all pages and I don’t see a way to disable it. I want to have a page link display as an embedded video in facebook not as webpage, which is the sensible (but unchangeable) default that bubble provides. If anyone has an idea or @bubble.

3

Squeaky wheel :wink: Anyone from @bubble?

4

Bump for visibility. Anyone?

5

Any suggestion on where to take this issue? In my mind, this is not exactly a feature request and its not exactly a ‘bug’ as its working as bubble intended, however there is simply no workaround for the forced metatag of type ‘page’.

6

rant/

I have the sinking realization that removing these fixed (incorrect) meta-tags may never get implemented. This is REALLY frustrating for my app development:

  • proper meta tags are crucial for marketing my app.
  • current implementation of SEO tags is incorrect/insufficient.
  • bubble users have minimal/no control over SEO tags in the <head>

I’m not holding my breath that this will ever get resolved.

  • The ‘idea board’ is pointless for my situation. Very few are asking for this except me.
  • Commissioning new features seems to be discontinued. I cannot even pay my way out of this mess.
  • In 2021 bubble is a mature startup with 100m funding, investors, roadmaps. If only I had brought this up this back when 2016 @emmanuel addressed this exact issue in this thread

Message in a bottle to @eve, @bubble
/rant

1 Like
7

Hi there, @jon2 :wave: I’ve been mucking about trying to see if it was possible to modify the SEO and meta tags via javascript. (I’m not very familiar with JS, so it’s been a slog.) Are you saying that this isn’t possible at all currently?

8

Any solutions?

9

<meta> tags are to help search engines, web/mobile apps, robots, etc understand the basic page content type . Most of these robots only look at the HTML that is initially served to them and won’t run any cleint-side javascript when indexing a page URL. So yeah, you can technically overwrite a tag in Javascript in the browser, but it won’t really do anything for these apps and robots.

This is 100% a platform issue based how bubble chooses to render HTML <meta> tags.

With bubble you can include your own HTML (which is visible to robots) and even include your own <meta> tags, however this HTML will be inserted after bubble’s hard-coded and predefined <meta> tags and thus ignored by robots and apps.

A simple solution to this problem would be the ability turn off predefined SEO / meta tags and then define your own.

Its odd that this is hard-coded into every page this way. I guess bubble engineers figured having a built-in basic meta tags were useful and not really causing any harm if they weren’t needed.

Back in the day someone was able to get @emmanuel to give his personal attention to this issue here on the forums. As I recall they were able to solve for their particular use case and nothing further was made of it. In 2022 bubble is scale-growth company and you won’t get that kind of attention from the CEO for an edge-case issue like this.

Your options are:

  1. Submit the issue to the ‘ideaboard’ and hope it is upvoted to get the attention of bubble product managers
  2. Scream into the void (similar to #1)
  3. Leave it alone. Change your app’s business model. Don’t expect to include an basic feature like sharing media content such as videos or photos to social media or smart phones.
1 Like
10

Thank you for the feedback. Our SEO tag implementation is indeed quite old, and is on our list of things to look into. That being said, I can’t commit to a timeline here, we have a lot of requests like this that the team is busy going through.

In general, the ideaboard is actually the right place for this. Our team looks at it regularly to gather product feedback and get datapoints to build our roadmap. (I read the forum, but it’s much more effective to do this via the ideaboard). We’re working hard on hiring and scaling the team to be able to ship features faster, but this is a long term investment.

7 Likes
11

I completely agree, however the SEO issue is an edge case and won’t get upvoted much.
This is why I joked about screaming into the void with the other poster :-).

@emmanuel Can we get a way to link to our ‘idea’ on the ideaboard? It would make it so much more useful :slight_smile: There is a disconnect between the forums where people search for their issues and the ideaboard where they are organized and prioritized.

Still, I believe this should receive somewhat higher attention because it is a bug (of sorts) and there is no alternative for users to fix it themselves. Many popular feature requests have alternative solutions via a plugin, design strategy, etc where SEO does not.

At a minimum, this doesn’t need to be a major new feature --just being able to disable built-in SEO tags would be sufficient.

1 Like
13

I’m guessing this ‘idea’ on the board comes closest to this thread.
[https://bubble.io/ideaboard/all?idea=1632955686195x938860085495726100](https://Ideaboard - Improved SEO)

Unfortunately, it only has 2 upvotes so far :sweat_smile:

14

Hi Jon,

I need a solution for this one too… Did you find a workaround?