If you read my email from a few weeks ago, you’ll know that Facebook had randomly decided that my www.michaelwilding.com blog was malicious or abusive.<\/p>\n
No idea why.<\/p>\n
It had been fine for nearly a decade. Then suddenly, one morning, I could no longer post links to my site.<\/p>\n
I spent ages on Google, and tried everything I found.<\/p>\n
No luck.<\/p>\n
I tried contacting Facebook.<\/p>\n
No luck.<\/p>\n
What the hell do you do in a situation like this?<\/p>\n
You’re communicating with a faceless organisation who send stock replies without actually reading your messages.<\/p>\n
A reader, Joshua, also got in touch with me saying the same thing had happened to him, and he’d got nowhere.<\/p>\n
And then…\u00a0he said something that got me thinking.<\/em><\/p>\n I went into the business manager for Facebook, and guess what?<\/p>\n They have a\u00a0live support<\/strong>\u00a0chat for their advertising.<\/p>\n Holy mother of god, I can actually speak to a real person.<\/p>\n Not only that, but a nice person, who knew what they were talking about.<\/p>\n The issue got escalated, and I was promised an email within the next 48 hours.<\/p>\n Expecting very little from it, I was shocked to find an email in the next few hours telling me that the listing was an error and had now been removed.<\/p>\n That’s possibly the first good, and it really was good, interaction I’ve ever had with Facebook support.<\/p>\n The secret?<\/p>\n Use their business advertising support chat.<\/em><\/p>\n Of course, the question is why did it happen to start with!<\/p>\n Facebook claim it was an error.<\/p>\n Me… I don’t think it was.<\/p>\n Just a few days before the block, I’d moved my DNS to CloudFlare and was using one of their free SSL certificates.<\/p>\n These certificates are shared amongst many users, which is why they’re free.<\/p>\n A few years ago Facebook was rejecting these SSL certificates as malicious.<\/p>\n However, due to the lack of IP addresses in the world, most SSL certificates are now shared.<\/p>\n What I think happened is… I moved to CloudFlare and my SSL changed from a dedicated one to a shared one. This flagged a warning in Facebook’s system and I got blocked.<\/p>\n Since having everything cleared and working again, I’ve purchased a dedicated SSL certificate through CloudFlare and have had no problems.<\/p>\n Was it the free SSL certificate they offered, or was it Facebook making a mistake?<\/p>\n Ultimately I’ll never know, but the issue is resolved.<\/p>\n What this\u00a0highlights is that if your main assets are held by another company (e.g. a Facebook page) then at any time your business could dissappear over night.<\/p>\n Make sure that you are always in control of your core business.<\/p>\n Over and out,<\/p>\n Michael<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you read my email from a few weeks ago, you’ll know that Facebook had randomly decided that my www.michaelwilding.com blog was malicious or abusive.\nNo idea why.\nIt had been fine for nearly a decade. Then suddenly, one morning, I could no longer post links to my site.\nI spent ages …<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3381,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108,11,182],"tags":[],"location":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelwilding.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3380"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelwilding.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelwilding.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwilding.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwilding.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwilding.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3380\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwilding.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelwilding.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwilding.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwilding.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3380"},{"taxonomy":"location","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwilding.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/location?post=3380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}