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Comment by sharkjacobs | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if outlets like Buzzfeed will be able to do something like write Facebook specific headlines to get past the clickbait filter, while still using clickbaity headlines for the same stories other places

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I've noticed the reverse on many occasions, especially from moderately reputable news sites. The Facebook specific metadata for the page will tell Facebook to annotate the article with a clickbait headline, but the actual title will be more reasonable and informative.

This is actually interesting. When Facebook determines the article title, their crawlers go out and pull down the page. It'd certainly be interesting to catch the user agent and present a different version if Facebook is detected.

I've read that google penalizes users if they present a different version of the page to bots than end users (I guess they pretend to be a browser and access the page from an undisclosed IP). I'd be surprised if Facebook didn't do the same.

You don't even have to do anything as complicated as that.

Lots of sites already use a separate title in their OG tags from what the normal version is.

You don't have to do anything more than at some metadata to your page which Facebook will automatically use.

I believe that Google's crawler is designed to detect when it's being fed false information, and punishes pages accordingly for it. Wouldn't be hard for Facebook to do the same thing.

Someone is probably writing you a job offer as I type this message

But then the post displays the non-clickbaity title, which defeats the point.

Presenting different content to Google's spider vs. users' browsers is the kind of thing that will get you banned from Google. I wonder if Facebook has similar policies.

For the record since many people are mentioning Facebook's metadata, the actual name for what it uses is called Open Graph : https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters

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