Troubleshooting: Social share engagement numbers are too high or very inaccurate

Authory collects information about how often the content you have in your Authory account is engaged with on social media.

This works by querying multiple 3rd party platforms like Twitter or Facebook regularly.

Since content can have multiple different URLs, Authory uses the canonical URL of the content to query engagement information. A canonical URL is a URL which identifies the most representative version of a web site, in case multiple URLs are used.

Almost all reported issues regarding wrong engagement numbers in the Analytics section or Weekly Social Shares email report are due to incorrect canonical URL configuration.

The most common cases are:

Generally, it's wise to configure canonical URLs correctly, as wrongly configured canonical URLs are heavily penalized by search engines.

You can find the canonical URL of any page in the source code:

Alternatively, you can also use a tool like this one to get the canonical URL of a page.

Visit the page the canonical URL points to. If you are redirected to another domain (like google.com) or the front page of your publication, the canonical URL is likely wrong and needs to be fixed.

Canonical URLs can be fixed by your webmaster or by changing the setting of your publishing tool.

Medium supports setting canonical URLs too. Here is a tutorial how to access the setting: Medium - Set a canonical link.

Generally, having no canonical URL is better than having an incorrect canonical URL.

After the canonical URL of the page has been fixed, please reach out to our team and mention for which domain and article you fixed the canonical URLs, so we can remove the incorrect data from your analytics dashboard.