Blog posts not posting to LinkedIn properly

This has been driving me crazy for a while. I have several blogs that I run and work on to varying degrees. I noticed one day that when I try to share a post through LinkedIn, none of the image and meta data would come in. I would only get the blog name.

When I set them up, one of the first things I do is set up security plugins to keep them clean from the very beginning. I noticed that on a few of my personal blogs that used to work fine aren’t anymore. Very frustrating.

After much deep thought and testing, I narrowed it down to something to do with the Better WordPress Security Plugin, I just couldn’t find out what part of it was causing the problem. This is one of the important plugins that I always install as soon as I start working on a site ever since having to rebuild ones that have been hacked.

Finally, Nathan Brauer figured out what the issue was. One of the banned list rules was blocking any user agent that starts with Link, which is of course LinkedIn. DOH!

Here’s the fix Nathan posted. I’ve done it and so far it is working. I’ll post here if it isn’t the full fix. Keep in mind that if you try to post a link and LinkedIn scrapes the info, it will be at least a week before LinkedIn will scrape it again. Seems you can’t force it any sooner.

Let me know if it works for you.