Metadata to block pages from being posted on social media

Question

I am working on a website that contains pages that some contributors do not want posted on social media, but they still want pages to be indexed by search engines.

For these pages, we add robots meta tags/HTTP headers to say "noarchive, nosnippet", and if we receive requests from user agents associated with social media such as Facebook, then we return HTTP 401.

We also include some text in the "license" portion of the schema.org markup to state that the pages should not be shared on social media or embedded in web pages without permission.

Is there a way to specify in metadata (schema.org, opengraph, etc) that web pages or images should not be shared or embedded? I'd rather do that than to rely on explicitly blocking user agents.

Answer 1

You can not prevent users from posting your links on Facebook, Twitter or any other social media platform, this is because a link itself holds no copyright or infringement, even terms, conditions and licensing.

You can, however, block various social media sites from taking the description from the page and the images embedded on the page. This is simply done by blocking their crawler using robots.txt, for example, Facebook uses:

facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php)

facebookexternalhit/1.1

So robots.txt would look something like this:

User-agent: facebookexternalhit
Disallow: /

Not using Open Graph

Most popular social media sites use Open Graph, so the logic would be not to use Open Graph if you do not want snippets of information being revealed on social media, again you can't block social media. If you do not want links to access via social media then you should a have login based system.

Force Redirect

Force redirects based on user agent generally don't work on most social media because the only reason their crawler visits your site is to obtain snippet information, which is prevented using user agent with robots.txt, so for example using:

<?php
    if(strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],'facebookexternalhit') || strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],'facebookexternalhit')){  
        header('Location: http://google.com/iphone');
        exit();
    }
?>

Would not prevent your link being shared on Facebook as the link would still be accessible but without a mini description.

Summary...

You can not prevent the links to your pages being shared on any platform, never mind social media. If user-generated content writers do not want their content found on social media, then you must make it authentication and then, of course, you won't be indexed by Google either.

Lastly...

There is no such law that prevents users copying and pasting links on 3rd party websites, no matter what your license says, it would never stand up in court. You could, however, request the links to be removed by the 3rd party.