I added a social media share plugin to my blog and for a while it appeared to work really well – IMHO it gave a fair count of any mentions on FB, Twitter etc. Until one day a few weeks ago when it showed NO activity on Facebook for a post where I knew there had been a certain number of shares. I tried several things to trouble shoot and none of them seemed to work – I turned off and then back on all plugins. I swapped the social media share plugins for several others but the count issue continued. Some of my posts seem to track what happens on FB (this one)

http://www.abigailgorton.com/2011/12/18/launch-your-web-presence-already/

And others show zero even when I saw ‘shares’

http://www.abigailgorton.com/2011/11/01/the-crossroads-of-the-persona/

Any ideas? Thanks!

@kristi-hines Thanks! I am pretty sure that I did not change the URL. And I am not an app developer. It is just inconsistent and it Seems to be only FB counts that are off.

@abigailgorton I think Facebook is in the middle of doing some “things” right now – I’ve noticed the their “like” button has changed and is not only causing formatting issues everyone but the FB counts also seem to be off.  I suspect it will get fixed on their end soon enough as this “currency” is their lifeline – without it blog owners will be less likely to include FB on their sites.   

On my end, to the point brought up by @kristi-hines, I just changed my permalink structure in my WordPress so that my posts no longer show a date – with WP 3.3 there is now a new permalink setting that allows you to set up your posts this way (just like for pages) – the downside was while I did redirects for all my posts, the social sharing counts all disappeared.  I knew that going in but made the change to my permalink structure anyway as long term that felt like a better decision.  Hopefully as more people make this same change all the social networks will catch up, but if not I guess 2012 will have to be something of a fresh slate.  

@abigailgorton was for a mix of things.  SEO was a consideration.  My weird obsession with neatness probably played a fact.  

The biggest reason though is a good deal of my traffic is coming from Google and many of my posts are less about timeliness and more about information so in terms of credibility I didn’t think it added much to have someone feel like they were reading “old” stuff.  I also get a very good amount of traffic from Stumble Upon – and same deal – no need for those visitors to feel like they are getting dated information.  Having the date added nothing and in fact actually made my links longer.

I also saw that just like with scenario of Krisi’s client, it will be easier to change/update my links – I started to have a few duplicate posts floating out there etc… 

Lastly, I think my links now look nicer.  And yes, I do think that matters.  Not a huge factor in outcomes and I suppose someone with more traffic could actually measure that to confirm. 

From what I’ve read, and granted I’m not the expert on this (any SEO experts want to chime in feel free to do so) the dates in your links are much more important if you are regularly publishing timely content (like a news site). 

Am I right?  The verdict is still out as it’s only been a few days but I suspect now that WordPress if offering this as a valid permalink structure you’ll start to see more blogs adopt this permalink structure.  

I ended up using this process  http://yoast.com/change-wordpress-permalink-structure/.  this makes you go into the htaccess file which scared the crap out of me but I did it anyway and it worked.  : )

if you are looking for a plugin and want to do it manually Redirection is a popular one.  I also used Simple 301 Redirects for a client of mine and it worked out well.

good luck.