What are Open Graph tags?
Open Graph is a set of meta tags, created by Facebook and now read by LinkedIn, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, iMessage and many others, that describe how a page should look when shared. They sit in the page's head, like <meta property="og:title" content="...">.
X reads them too, and adds its own twitter: tags, mainly twitter:card to choose the card layout.
The Open Graph tags every page needs
These five cover almost every platform.
- og:title
- The headline on the card. Keep it short and specific; long titles are cut off.
- og:description
- One or two sentences under the title. Some platforms hide it on small cards.
- og:image
- The card image, as a full https:// URL. The single biggest factor in whether a share gets noticed.
- og:url
- The canonical URL of the page, so shares of different URL variants count together.
- og:type
- website for most pages, article for blog posts and news.
What size should an og:image be?
1200 × 630 pixels is the common choice. It's the size Facebook recommends for high-resolution displays and it crops well on LinkedIn and X's large card. Keep important text and faces away from the edges, since some platforms crop to a square or 2:1.
Keep the file small. Facebook's limit is 8 MB and X's is 5 MB, but a JPEG or PNG of a few hundred KB loads faster and is less likely to time out when the bot fetches it. Adding og:image:width and og:image:height lets Facebook show the image on the very first share.
Twitter Card tags
X uses twitter:card to pick a layout: summary shows a small square thumbnail, summary_large_image shows a wide image across the top. If twitter:title, twitter:description or twitter:image are missing, X falls back to the matching og: tags, so you only need twitter:card plus anything you want to be different on X.
Why does my link still show the old preview?
Platforms cache share cards, sometimes for weeks. After fixing your tags, ask each platform to re-scrape the page: Facebook's Sharing Debugger has a Scrape Again button, and LinkedIn's Post Inspector refreshes its copy when you inspect the URL. Others update when their cache expires.
Common Open Graph mistakes
The checker looks for these.
- No og:image, so the platform picks a logo or icon from the page
- A relative image path like /images/card.png instead of a full URL
- An image that 404s, is behind a login, or blocks bots
- Tags added by JavaScript, which preview bots never see
- The same og:title and image on every page of the site
- Missing twitter:card, so X shows a small card instead of a large one
Do Open Graph tags help SEO?
Not directly. Google doesn't use Open Graph tags as a ranking signal. They affect how your links look on social platforms and in chat apps, which affects how many people click them. Your title tag and meta description are what Google reads for search results.