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When I try to share anything from facebook, I get the default description:

The Joomla! content management system lets you create webpages of various types using extensions. There are 5 basic types of extensions: components, modules,...

which I want to change.

Under Global Configuration, Meta Deta Settings, I have already placed my own meta description.

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  • Consider attaching a screenshot from Facebook, as well as a snippet from the rendered page.
    – Valentin Despa
    Commented Nov 29, 2014 at 13:29
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    Sometimes when you share something on Facebook, and then change the meta description, Facebook keeps using the old meta data for a while. Try clearing your Joomla and browser cache, or wait a couple of hours and share again.
    – johanpw
    Commented Nov 29, 2014 at 14:11
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    I've noticed that text appears to be part of the installed sample data - googling it shows a lot of sites that have it under a title "Extensions", so I'd suggest that look at which articles are appearing where (Front Page?), and probably trash/remove the sample data, replacing it with your own.
    – GDP
    Commented Nov 29, 2014 at 15:04

2 Answers 2

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When you Share something on Facebook, Facebook will use the most recent information that its scraper has cached from your pages. If FB scraper has not yet crawled a page, then it will read your metadata and generate the content for the shared post at that time.

Usually it will prefer to see Open Graph meta tags.

A sample of og:metatags that can exist on a page, to describe its content for FB sharing:

<meta property="fb:admins" content="100000375458816">
<meta property="fb:app_id" content="633297421913264">
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.mysite.com/about">
<meta property="og:title" content="My About Us Page Title">
<meta property="og:type" content="article">
<meta property="og:description" content="My about us Page Description">
<meta property="og:image" content="http://www.mysite.com/images/about-us.jpg">

If those do not exist, it will use the default meta tags of your website.

So make sure your pages meta have the desired content - this involves reviewing your global metadata and also the metadata of your individual pages (e.g. menu items metadata and article items). Finally after any changes it is suggested to have your Joomla's site cache cleared, in order to display the most up to date data.

Facebook scraper usually caches the content for 24 hours (if I can recall this right). You can force facebook scraper to clear the cached information of your page with the Open Graph Debugger Tool.

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Apart from the Global Configuration, meta data can be included in articles, categories and menus (see "Meta data hierarchy in Joomla" at https://joomla.stackexchange.com/a/5241/120 for more details).

You may need to clear the Joomla cache after meta data changes to ensure Facebook is seeing the most recent version of web pages.

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