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I have actually been reading and thinking about adding OpenGraph meta tags to help people who are sharing my blog posts, and different information of my site on Facebook. From reading, that will help index the site even better.

The basic setup for my site would go something like this for each page:

<meta property="og:title" content="Page Title" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Piece of page information" />
<meta property="og:url" content="URL of Page" />
<meta property="og:image" content="Featured Image" />

I know this helps with sharing the page on Facebook, but I wonder if Google is going to also use any of it for SEO of the webpages? From what I have been researching, I am not sure how well Google handles the OpenGraph protocol for indexing.

Does Google use the OpenGraph tags to help index web pages?

2 Answers 2

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No. Google does not use OpenGraph tags. It is proprietary to Facebook.

Additionally, they are functionally no different then the description and keyword meta tags which Google has stated is not used in their algorithm.

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    I hate to ask, but do you have any sources to confirm this? I have been looking like crazy on the web, but I see a lot of maybes or I don't knows, but no direct answers from Google or anyone.
    – Traven
    Commented May 7, 2014 at 1:41
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    Google won't say they don't use it because it's essentially obvious. It's something Facebook uses, not Google. So if Facebook decides to change them it breaks Google. And its similarity to already confirmed obsolete meta tags would make it a major contradiction to what we already know.
    – John Conde
    Commented May 7, 2014 at 1:45
  • confirmation: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6243451
    – albert
    Commented May 7, 2014 at 8:07
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    Google doesn't use Open-Graph meta tags for indexing in web-search. AFAIK we use them for Google+ snippets though ( developers.google.com/+/web/snippet ). Commented May 14, 2014 at 8:24
  • Google's structured meta data testing tool considers OpenGraph, Google+ definitely does. If you are an e-commerce website, schema is more important but for a blog OpenGraph is important, many websites use it beyond Google and Facebook such as Pinterest. This is a good article on structured meta data: moz.com/blog/meta-data-templates-123
    – Muskie
    Commented May 16, 2014 at 17:34
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Its open protocol so many other social media sites do use like Pinterest, Google Plus do use them check here https://developers.google.com/+/web/snippet/.

It will add up your SMO which in turn will help your search results too.

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