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I'm going to be changing the domain name of one of my sites. I'll use 301 redirects.

One thing that I can't figure out is how to preserve all the comments that users have made on the page through Facebook. We use the Facebook developer comment API to allow comments on our pages.

It appears that when I change the URL of my page, the comments on the page disappear. Is there any way to let facebook know that this URL is changing and that comments should be moved over?

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  • I'm pretty sure there is, I know from personally experience that Disqus has this and would be silly if Facebook didn't... Taking a look now for ya. – Simon Hayter♦ Jan 31 '14 at 17:10
  • Doesnt look too good. Apparently graph data is fixed > stackoverflow.com/questions/7197919/… unless that is not the case. – Simon Hayter♦ Jan 31 '14 at 17:12
  • You can't transfer "Likes" from one domain to another, so I wouldn't be surprised if the comments couldn't be migrated either. It seems kind of stupid, but I believe Facebook considers a "comment" to be something similar to a "Like", so it would make sense in that regard. – nathangiesbrecht Mar 3 '14 at 21:59
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I wish I could do this, but the Answer which I got from the Developers Community for the API is that your page is an 'object'. URL, Comments, and Likes are fixed to that object. The best bet is to use a 301 Redirect to the new page. The Facebook crawler maintains that object for the future.

As the link which bybe shared in the comments, the instructions does allow a fix to this issue.

  • On /newpage, keep the og:url tag pointing to /oldurl
  • Add a HTTP 301 redirect from /oldurl to /newurl
    • Exempt the Facebook crawler from this redirect
    • Continue to serve the meta tags for the page on http://www.example.com/oldurl if the request comes from the Facebook crawler.
    • No need to return any actual content to the crawler, just a simple HTML page with the appropriate tags
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  • I lose control over the old domain in a few months. It appears that this will not work unless you can retain control over the old domain name indefinitely. – Stephen Ostermiller♦ Mar 26 '14 at 15:34
  • I am sorry to hear that, then with how Facebook keeps the information which you are wanting to keep... it is lost forever sadly. Unless they change their policy in the future. The information will be kept on their servers for as long we know. – user37204 Mar 26 '14 at 15:36

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