Yoast SEO: Pinterest and Facebook open graph incompatibility (article:author property)

[liotro78]

There is a minor conflict between Pinterest and Facebook in their implementation of the Open Graph protocol article:author property:

• Facebook article objects: An array of Facebook profile URLs or IDs of the authors for this article.
• Pinterest Rich Pins: Article author, all line breaks and HTML tags will be removed.

The only middle ground is when you use a Facebook ID without the rest of the URL. That way Pinterest will at least have something to work with—but it probably won’t look nice.

So, as you can see, although Pinterest uses Open Graph meta tags for its Rich Pins, the value it expects (a person's name) cannot be compatible with Facebook (or the Open Graph standard).

Currently in Yoast SEO there is no way to address the incompatibility.

In a future Yoast SEO revision, could you think to add a new code solution so that when (and only when) the Pinterest crawler is detected, the true 'Author Name' (and not his/her Social FB profile URL) will be used to provide a compatible name for Pinterest?

Currently all pinned articles with author name given as an FB profile, for example:
<meta property="article:author" content="https://www.facebook.com/ABCDEFG">
on Pinterest are displayed without Author name. Looking to the Pinterest Rich Pin Validator, indeed an error is produced in the article:author property: see one example

I also observed that for a user without FB profile configured in Yoast SEO, Pinterest Rich Pins correctly displayed the author name.

I found a internet page discussing on this issue: http://synapticism.com/dev/pinterest-and-facebook-open-graph-incompatibility-fix/

Let me know and thanks in advance for your support!

Regards, Alfonso

[Rarst]

Not confident this is something we could handle in the plugin nicely. As the article you linked covers it's pretty much a no go with any caching in place.

It is strange of Pinterest to use Facebook's protocol, but want to see a different values.

[atimmer]

We are not going to autodetect which bot is visiting the page and then serve a different value, but we can investigate if we can intelligently handle this. If Pinterest and Facebook really do something completely different, we can never fix this.

[Rarst]

At this time Pinterest explicitly expects different data in article:author than Facebook does, so this is not resolvable without sniffing a bot. If things change in future we'll see.

[AiratHalitov]

Related: #11441 (comment)