Jeff Stevens recently discovered an odd Internet Explorer / Facebook “Like” bug that appended “?fb_xd_fragment=” to the end of shared articles on someone’s Facebook wall.
The problem was, when links containing that fragment were used, the website would not show anything – zip, zilch, nada – completely blank.
In checking our Google Analytics, we saw ample traffic pointing to users viewing content on our websites with this fragment in the URL.
Solution: .htaccess to the Rescue
Some solutions suggested using javascript to solve the redirect issue, but we like another method: .htaccess.
Since users are visiting your website via a specific URL, you should be able redirect them based on that fact, well before any PHP or Javascript is loaded.
To accomplish this, insert the following 2 lines into your .htaccess file
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} fb_xd_fragment=
RewriteRule (.*) $1? [R=301,NC,L]
WordPress MultiSite Implementation
For our WordPress MultiSite service, which we configured as sub-domains, we had to modify the RewriteRule just a bit:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} fb_xd_fragment=
RewriteRule (.*) http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1? [R=301,NC,L]
Now the thousands of poor visitors seeing blank websites will be redirected to a normal website.