Missing og:image tag

No og:image tag on your page means Embedly falls back to scraping body images, which often produces nothing usable.

curl -s https://yoursite.com/page | grep -i "og:image"

JavaScript-rendered tags

Neither redditbot nor Embedly runs JavaScript. If your OG tags are injected client-side, they’re invisible to both crawlers. You need SSR or a prerender service.

robots.txt blocking redditbot

redditbot honors robots.txt. A blanket disallow means no crawl, no preview. Add an explicit allow:

User-agent: redditbot
Allow: /

Server timeout or HTTPS issues

Embedly has tight timeouts. Slow responses or SSL certificate problems cause silent failures. Make sure your server responds in a few seconds with a valid cert.

Image URL inaccessible

The og:image URL must be publicly reachable. Images behind auth, on localhost, or with broken URLs produce no thumbnail. Open the og:image URL directly in a browser to verify.

Subreddit thumbnails disabled

Some subreddits have thumbnails turned off in moderator settings. If your link works in r/test but not in the target subreddit, it’s a subreddit config issue, not your tags.

Diagnosis steps

1. Curl your URL and check for og:image in the HTML
2. Open the og:image URL directly – does the image load?
3. Fetch /robots.txt and confirm redditbot isn’t blocked
4. Submit the URL in r/test to rule out subreddit settings
5. Check embed.ly/code to see what Embedly actually extracts

Testing your fix

Submit the URL as a new link post in r/test. Reddit scrapes once at submission, so you need a new post to see changes. If Embedly has cached stale data, append ?v=2 to the URL to force a fresh fetch.