Google+ Bug Sharing The Wrong URLs?

There appears to be a bug with Google+ that’s sometimes causing the wrong URLs to appear when sharing pages.

At first, I thought this was something happening just with me as an odd glitch. I was on Google+ today, entered a URL I wanted to share, and the wrong page title and description came up. I started over, and the problem went away.

Then Matt McGee, our executive news editor, found a similar issue happening:

See how the headline of the story is different than what he’s sharing. Not only is the headline not correct, but sharing from that article actually caused Google+ to try and share a completely different article.

We started looking to see if it was a problem on our end, but then I came across this being shared from another site in my own Google+ feed:

See how the headline is about “Help Desk Software” and doesn’t look properly formatted? If you click on the link, you get taken to a completely different story at VentureBeat, about Disney buying LucasArts as part of the Lucasfilm deal.

Looking around on Google+, I couldn’t see many others reporting the issue so far (AJ Kohn is one of the few), so it seems sporadic rather than widespread. But we’re checking with Google on it and will update, when we know more.

Postscript (Oct. 31): Google confirms this was a bug that’s now been fixed.

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Google: Google +1 | Google: Google+

About The Author: Danny Sullivan is Founding Editor of Marketing Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search marketing and internet marketing issues, who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also serves as Chief Content Officer for Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series. He has a personal blog called Daggle (and keeps his disclosures page there). He can be found on Facebook, Google + and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan. See more articles by Danny Sullivan

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http://paulalay.com/ Paula Lay

Just had this problem too Danny. It probably took me about 4-5 attempts (removal and re-link) to get the article thumbnail, correct title and description showing.. a long winded band aid solution for sharing. Initially thought it was a problem with my company site until a colleague passed through this article.
http://www.seoskeptic.com/ Aaron Bradley

This was happening to me too – when I posted there was no thumbnail, and instead of the article title and description what came up was “Quantcast” with a description relating to Quantcast (the referenced URL was on a Quantified site, but the post itself had nothing to do with Quantcast, nor was there any metadata related to Quantast – only the tracking pixel itself).

Closing and reopening the browser did the trick, though.