Subject areaData and infrastructure
Also known asog tags
Open Graph is the protocol Facebook introduced in 2010 to turn a web page into an object social platforms can recognise.
It is written as a few meta tags in the page's HTML header, all prefixed with og:: og:title for the title, og:description for the short text, og:image for the image, og:url for the canonical address (the official one for the page) and og:type for the content type.
When someone pastes a link into LinkedIn, Facebook, WhatsApp or almost any other platform, the platform's crawler reads these tags and builds the preview card. If they are missing, the platform guesses, and it often picks the wrong image or a text cut in half. It follows that Open Graph tags decide the first impression of shared content, and therefore part of the clicks it gets.
Open Graph sits alongside schema.org structured data: the latter describes the page to search engines, the former sets up its shop window on social media.
An example
The case below is constructed, because the term does not yet appear in the articles. A manufacturer of mechanical components shares the page of a new bearing on LinkedIn: thanks to og:title, og:description and og:image the preview shows the product name, a clear sentence and the right photo, instead of a randomly cropped site logo.
Enrico Giubertoni. Licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0: you may quote, translate and adapt this entry with the author’s name and a link, stating any changes. For commercial use, write to info@enricogiubertoni.com
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