What is Open Graph?

Open Graph is a meta tag protocol that controls the preview card (title, image, description) shown when a page is shared on social media; Facebook published it at ogp.me in 2010.
The four required properties are og:title, og:type, og:image, and og:url, while adding og:description, og:site_name, and og:locale improves card quality.
The recommended og:image size is 1200x630px (a 1.91:1 ratio), which displays without cropping on most platforms including Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Slack, and Discord.
Open Graph tags are not a direct Google ranking factor, but they raise share click-through rates (CTR), producing an indirect SEO benefit by increasing branded traffic and dwell time.
After editing the tags, you must force-refresh the cache with Facebook's Sharing Debugger before the new preview takes effect.

Overview

Open Graph is a metadata protocol that Facebook released in 2010 to represent a web page as a single object within the social graph. By placing tags of the form <meta property="og:.."> inside a page's <head>, the author directly specifies the title, image, and description that will appear when the link is shared on a social platform. Without these tags, the platform pulls content arbitrarily from the page body, which often surfaces an unintended image or a truncated caption.

The standard (ogp.me) uses https://ogp.me/ns# as its namespace and is built from a property attribute paired with a content value. Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, Discord, KakaoTalk, and many other platforms follow the protocol as-is, while X (Twitter) reads Twitter Cards first and falls back to Open Graph values when those tags are absent.

Required and Recommended Tags

Tag	Type	Role
og:title	Required	Title shown on the share card
og:type	Required	Object type (e.g., website, article, video.movie)
og:image	Required	Preview image URL (1200x630px recommended)
og:url	Required	Canonical URL that serves as the object's permanent identifier
og:description	Recommended	One to two sentence description
og:site_name	Recommended	Name of the overall site
og:locale	Recommended	Locale in language_TERRITORY format (e.g., ko_KR)
og:image:width / height / alt	Optional	Explicit image dimensions and alt text (stabilizes rendering on first share)

Markup Example

The following is a basic implementation that follows the standard ogp.me syntax. It declares the prefix on the <html> tag and pairs the four required properties with description and image metadata.

<html prefix="og: https://ogp.me/ns#">
<head>
  <meta property="og:title" content="Search OS Glossary" />
  <meta property="og:type" content="article" />
  <meta property="og:url" content="https://example.com/glossary/open-graph" />
  <meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/og/open-graph.png" />
  <meta property="og:image:width" content="1200" />
  <meta property="og:image:height" content="630" />
  <meta property="og:description" content="How to control social sharing previews with Open Graph meta tags." />
  <meta property="og:site_name" content="Search OS" />
  <meta property="og:locale" content="en_US" />
</head>

Recommended Image Specifications

According to industry guidance, when you use a single og:image, 1200x630px (a 1.91:1 ratio) is the de facto standard that displays without cropping on Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Slack, Discord, and others. Save it as JPG or PNG and keep key text and faces inside the central safe area. Facebook's official documentation does not prescribe exact pixel dimensions, but it recommends specifying width and height so the image renders correctly on the first share.

Evidence and Indirect SEO Effect

Open Graph tags are not a direct Google ranking factor, and adding them will not immediately lift search rankings. The indirect effect, however, is clear. Industry analyses report that a well-configured preview raises the click-through rate of shared links compared to a bare URL, and those additional clicks drive higher branded search volume, repeat visits, and dwell time, all of which feed metrics Google interprets as authority signals (sources: NoGood, Ahrefs-style SEO guides, env.dev). Some analyses also note that AI crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot reference og:title, og:description, and article:modified_time when deciding how to summarize or cite a page, which makes the protocol meaningful from a GEO perspective as well.

Cache Refresh Caveat

Facebook caches OG data by URL, so editing the tags will not change the preview immediately as long as the URL stays the same. After making a change, you must re-scrape the page with Facebook's Sharing Debugger to force the cache to refresh. The same tool also lets you check which tags are recognized and whether anything is missing or malformed.

Open Graph