I can’t remember when this started, but for a while now, if you paste a link into Facebook from the Guardian, you get the 404 page above as a thumbnail. If you click on the link, it does go to the page you wanted to link to, but who in their right mind would want to click on a 404 error?
To force the Guardian links to behave, all you have to do is to add a trailing slash (/) on to the URL. So if your link looks like this:
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/may/16/sophie-heawood-fallen-out-of-love-with-music
add a / on to the end so it looks like this:
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/may/16/sophie-heawood-fallen-out-of-love-with-music/
Do it before you copy and paste the link rather than adding it when you write the post, because most of the time, Facebook will already grab the 404 page and grab it before you’ve had a chance to edit. So add the slash in the address bar, then copy it, then paste it.
Do that, and that nasty 404 page will magically turn into this (for the URL above)
By the way, it’s a great article, so do click on the link and read it, as well as taking the tip.
