Free Open Graph Preview | Links to Wild

Q: Do Open Graph tags affect SEO?

No. Google does not read og:title or og:description for ranking or for building a snippet — it uses the title tag and the page copy. What the tags change is whether a share looks like something worth clicking, which affects how far the link travels and who ends up seeing it. That is a distribution argument, not a ranking one.

Facebook / LinkedIn

No og:image

example.com

X

No image

Nothing you type here is uploaded, stored or sent anywhere. It all runs in your browser.

What each platform needs

og:title, og:description, og:image, og:url are the four that matter. Facebook and LinkedIn both read them.
X falls back to Open Graph if the twitter: tags are absent, so you rarely need both. twitter:card set to summary_large_image is the exception worth adding.
Images: 1200×630, under 5MB, absolute URL. A relative path silently produces no image at all.
Without og:title, platforms fall back to the page title, then to whatever text they can find. The result is usually ugly rather than absent.

Platforms cache aggressively. After fixing tags, re-scrape through Facebook's Sharing Debugger or LinkedIn's Post Inspector, or the old card will keep appearing for days.

Questions people ask

Do Open Graph tags affect SEO?

No. Google does not read og:title or og:description for ranking or for building a snippet — it uses the title tag and the page copy. What the tags change is whether a share looks like something worth clicking, which affects how far the link travels and who ends up seeing it. That is a distribution argument, not a ranking one.

LinkedIn is still showing the old image after I fixed the tags. How long?

LinkedIn caches an unfurl for about seven days and will not refresh it because you asked nicely. Run the URL through the Post Inspector, which forces a re-scrape. Facebook has the same behaviour and the same fix in its Sharing Debugger.

Do I need og:image:width and og:image:height?

They are optional and worth adding. Without them the platform has to download the image before it knows the shape, so the first person to share a new URL often gets the small card while everyone afterwards gets the large one. Declaring 1200 by 630 removes that coin flip.

Why does my staging URL produce no card at all?

Because the scraper is an anonymous bot and your staging site asks it for a password. Anything behind basic auth, an IP allowlist or a "coming soon" plugin unfurls as nothing. There is no tag that fixes this — test on a publicly reachable URL.

Do Slack and WhatsApp read the same tags?

Broadly yes, with quirks. Slack prefers oEmbed where a site offers it and falls back to Open Graph. WhatsApp wants a small image and will show no preview at all rather than resize a large one, so a 1200 by 630 file over a few hundred kilobytes often unfurls bare. If chat sharing matters, check it in the app rather than trusting the preview here.

Open Graph Preview