Twitter Cards not working, but show as approved in the Validator

[Valdfellgar]

Hi, I’m in need of a little help with the Twitter Cards? Previously they worked fine, but sometime this month things apparently changed. A few of the cards on our twitter still work, but most now pull up blank images. I’ve tried the Validator again and everything comes up green:

INFO: Page fetched successfully
INFO: 27 metatags were found
INFO: twitter:card = summary_large_image tag found
INFO: Card loaded successfully

Etc. It says the URL is whitelisted, but when it fetches the Card to show that it’s working still it comes up grey/blank.
Here’s an example of one that should work but isn’t. http://www.allyouranime.net/the-promised-neverland-020-022-review/

We recently had a severe hotlinking problem, so we turned off hotlinking/and blocked Google spoofing crawl/metabots, but I wouldn’t think those measures would affect Twitter Cards. Some help would be greatly appreciated. This issue doesn’t seem to affect when we post the same stuff on facebook.

[Valdfellgar]

As an additional note we also set up a Robots.txt file on the website and additional reading has made me wonder if

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-content/uploads/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

caused a problem with Twitter being able to see the images it needs. I’ve since updated the robots.txt file with:
User-agent: Twitterbot
Disallow:

But I’m still new to all this, so I don’t know if I added it correctly. So far it hasn’t seemed to change anything, although I don’t know how long it would take to address the issue.

[andypiper]

Yes - that would have stopped the crawler from seeing the images. If the images are still not appearing it could be a caching issue (the crawler re-caches every 7 days or so).

[Valdfellgar]

I see, I was afraid of that. I’ve redone the robots.txt file to read like this:
User-agent: Twitterbot
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-content/uploads/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

Is that the correct way to allow Twitterbot the access it needs?

Also just to make sure there isn’t another issue. I’ve noticed that it seems like all our much older posts (anything from before the 10th of January) still create Twitter Cards properly in the validator. In fact, it seems like it’s only anything made January 10th or after (I think that’s when I updated the Robots.text file?) that won’t display properly. Save for one post:
http://www.allyouranime.net/acca-13-territory-inspection-dept-preview/ creates a Twitter Card as it should, where as
http://www.allyouranime.net/hand-shakers-preview/
http://www.allyouranime.net/gabriel-dropout-preview/

both don’t show up as they should in the Validator. And then, again, everything else after the Acca post. Any idea why that one worked after the change, but the rest were blocked? Just trying to make sure there isn’t some other issue.

[andypiper]

I think it’s most likely that there was a period during which your cached cards didn’t have images, and these are now being refetched and cached with the new updated robots.txt file. Both of the links you just shared seem to have images in the validator now.

[Valdfellgar]

Oh, yep, you’re right. Viewing things through an incognito window seems to show they’re starting to show up correctly on my Twitter profile too. Whew, glad that’s all it was. Thanks for the help!

[system]

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