Sharethis and Facebook like button pulling old meta description

Question

I am using the code below, just the standard FBML like button, installed it, was working fine, then I changed the Meta description, but the button still pulls the old one rather than the new one.

I have flushed the database, so the old description isn't anywhere on my site or system.

<div id="fb-root"></div><script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#appId=262424633777014&amp;xfbml=1"></script><fb:like href="" send="false" width="400" show_faces="false" action="like" font="verdana"></fb:like>

I've read in one of the answers that FB stores this in their own database once it is first shared.

Any thoughts on how to solve this, or if Facebook updates after a certain time?

Incidentally, something similar was happening with a Sharethis button, the old style button pulls the old meta description and the new one the new meta.

The baffling thing is the old data is definitely no longer on my site.

Any hints, answers greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Run this tool on your page: http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug

It will force clear the cache.

It will help if you are using open graph meta tags too: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/

Answer 2

It's in their cache, indeed. It should get updated automatically at some point. It's hard to say when, plus if your page is not watched by many people, it may never get updated (not worth it on their end.)

Answer 3

Like explained in the Like Button documentation

When does Facebook scrape my page?

Facebook needs to scrape your page to know how to display it around the site.

Facebook scrapes your page every 24 hours to ensure the properties are up to date. The page is also scraped when an admin for the Open Graph page clicks the Like button and when the URL is entered into the Facebook URL Linter. Facebook observes cache headers on your URLs - it will look at "Expires" and "Cache-Control" in order of preference. However, even if you specify a longer time, Facebook will scrape your page every 24 hours.

The user agent of the scraper is: "facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php)"