facebook like: href url vs. canonical url

Question

for tracking purposes, I want that the URL, which appears on the facebook stream after an \"like-action\", is slightly different from the URL the user actually liked.

Answer 1

You can't do exactly what you have requested, but you can still add an arbitrary tracking parameter (especially useful for analytics purposes). Facebook recently added a ref parameter to the fb:like element for this purpose. It's up to you to decide how you want to stuff various bits of information into that single parameter and then parse fb_ref whenever it's included in an incoming URLs.

Example

Place the following element on your HTML page:

<fb:like href="http://example.com/test.html" ref="144141"></fb:like>

Users clicking the link from Facebook should be directed to:

http://example.com/test.html?fb_ref=144141&fb_source=home_multiline

Documentation

• "Adding More Features to the Like Button" blog post
• fb:like button documentation