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I am doing an SEO project and I noticed that all of the meta tags have an "og" in the property attribute of the tag, such as:

<meta property="og:title" content="" />
<meta property="og:type" content="" />
<meta property="og:url" content="" />
<meta property="og:image" content="" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="" />
<meta property="og:description" content="" />

I'm wondering if using the Open Graph Protocol is helpful or possible harmful to SEO and what is the best practice?

I think it's supposed to make it easier for Facebook and other social networks to share the metadata on your site, but what I really care about is the Google organic search ranking.

So should I repeat/double the description meta tag with one that does not have the og property, or remove the og property, or just leave it in because the og property is harmless to SEO?

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    Open Graph has absolutely no direct effect on search performance, but is said to effect social media positively. Check out blog.kissmetrics.com/open-graph-meta-tags
    – closetnoc
    Dec 30, 2015 at 16:08
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    These are meta tags and more of guidelines for machines than content. It does not have any positive or negative effect on SEO.
    – Robert hue
    Dec 31, 2015 at 6:44

3 Answers 3

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As far as I know it wouldn't have any effect on the search rankings, the main purpose of the open graph tags is to make it prettier if the page is shared on social media.

Hope this helps.

If you are using PHP, you could always do the following so you end up with the same description for the meta description tag and the og:description tag:

<?php     
$description = "Search Engine Optimisation"; 
?>

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head prefix="og: http://ogp.me/ns# fb: http://ogp.me/ns/fb# website: http://ogp.me/ns/website#">
<meta charset="utf-8">

<!-- Meta Tags for Page Related Properties -->
<meta name="description" content="<?php echo $description; ?>">
<meta property="og:description" content="<?php echo $description; ?>">
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Not at all. Google does not using open graph meta tags, neither in Search Snippet/Result nor in Search Ranking.

Ref - Meta Tags That Google Understand

OGP is useful for Social Media, because you can use different title in og:title tag, and different images to get more CTR.

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Unless you try to deceive, there is no reason to assume that it could hurt your ranking. But providing structured data typically has no direct influence on the ranking anyway, so it wouldn’t help either.

If you want to provide a meta-description in addition to og:description, you don’t have to duplicate the description, because RDFa allows to use property and name on the same meta element:

<meta name="description" property="og:description" content="great description" />

The same is true for link elements¹, e.g. if you want to provide rel-canonical in addition to og:url:

<link rel="canonical" property="og:url" href="http://example.com/foo-1" />

¹ link must be used instead of meta if the value is a URI (this is required by HTML5, but the OGP/Facebook documentation doesn’t seem to care)

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