Facebook Open Graph Protocol Guide

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Facebook Open Graph protocol is a set of rules and markup that enables Facebook to recognize the content in the web page. Any web page that has Facebook Open Graph protocol embedded on it gets recognized by Facebook as objects and receives the same treatment and functionality as any other object on Facebook. The web pages must add the basic meta data in order to get recognized as objects.

Four Required Properties of Facebook Open Graph Protocol

You will have to add the following four properties of basic meta data in order to turn your web pages into graph objects.

open graph protocol
The Open Graph Protocol (Image credit:- ogp.me)

(Add in the head of the page)

og:title – This specifies the title of your object. This is mainly the title of the web page itself.

Example:- <meta property=”og:title” content=”The Rock” />

og:type – The specifies the object type like video.

Example:- <meta property=”og:type” content=”video.movie” />

og:image – This specifies the image url that will represent the object.

Example:- <meta property=”og:url” content=”your image url goes here” />

og:url – This specifies the canonical url of the object that is used as a permanent id.

Example:- <meta property=”og:image” content=”http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/rock.jpg” />

(More advice can be found here :- http://ogp.me/)


Google Vs Facebook in Capturing Meta Data About a Webpage

It has become really important for the search engines and the social media service providers to understand the content displayed on the webpages in order to serve the users well. Due to this reason, Google supports microdata, microformats, RDFa and Data highlighter while Facebook supports the Open Graph Protocol.

SEO Advice

It is better from SEO point of view to implement both the Google rich snippets as well as Facebook Open Graph Protocol on the site’s content as it will give the web pages more visibility.

Also See:-

Facebook Graph Search Optimization Guide
Facebook Graph Search Vs Google Search
Rich Snippets in Google
Add Ratings and Reviews on Google Search Results
Seo Guide for Schema