Open Graph Protocol is a protocol which highly simplifies the developers’ life. The Open Graph protocol enables developers to integrate their pages into the social graph. These pages gain the functionality of other graph objects including profile links and stream updates for connected users.
So, why is this protocol helpful for us and how will it solve our problems with the links?
Open Graph Protocol is being used for Facebook social network and we are going to use this example in order to describe this protocol in details.
Open Graph uses Meta tags with own attributes and there is a big number of these attributes in the protocol. Here are some of them:
1. <meta property="og:title" content="The Rock"/>
2. <meta property="og:type" content="movie"/>
3. <meta property="og:url" content="
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/"/>
4. <meta property="og:image" content="
http://ia.media-imdb.com/rock.jpg"/>
5. <meta property="og:site_name" content="IMDb"/>
6. <meta property="fb:admins" content="USER_ID"/>
7. <meta property="og:description" content="A group of U.S. Marines, under command of a renegade general, take over Alcatraz and threaten San Francisco Bay with biological weapons."/>
* This source code was highlighted with Source Code Highlighter.
og:title – it contains the header of the article or the page.
og:type – it is the page type and it can be different, for example website, blog, ect.
og:url – it is the link to your content.
og:image – it is the image for preview or the site logo.
fb:admins – it is the administrator’s ID of your company page on Facebook. If there is not this page, the URL Linter validation will not be done.
og:description – the description of the link, article, page, product, etc.
So, this is what we need to do in order to make Facebook show the links to our site correctly.
Please also be aware that Facebook caches the tags of your site and you need to use the URL Linter tool in order not to require the tags every time and update this cache. URL Linter tool also fit you for checking the correctness of the Open Graph tags mapping. Or you have the other variant to launch it from the server: l curl developers.facebook.com/tools/lint/?url={YOUR_URL}&format=json
where YOUR_URL is the URL which you use in Facebook Social Plugins.
So, you can see on the Facebook example that Open Graph Protocol gives the opportunity to enable any webpage to become a rich object in a social graph.
We can come to conclusion that Open Graph Protocol is a tool for Social Engine Optimization.
A lot of our lovely websites support the Open Graph protocol, such like FaceBook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc.
The realization of this protocol can be found in GoMage SEO Booster. What does it mean? It means that you should not do anything manually and GoMage SEO Booster extension uses this Open Graph Protocol and helps you to output your site in the social networks without any efforts. The only thing you should do is to enable this functional by clicking on the Enable/Disable button:
https://www.gomage.com/extensions/gomage-seo-booster.html