The New SEO: Introducing OGP
In 2010, Facebook introduced a new way for Web sites to integrate semantic metadata into its HTML that can declare the identity or function of the site and can specify the way the site owner would like the site indexed by Facebook. This metadata is known as Open Graph Protocol, or OGP. Overnight, as Web sites began to integrate OGP and social plugins into their own HTML for Facebook to discover, Facebook turned from a social network focusing on just friends and family connections on Facebook.com to a global network of hundreds of thousands of Web sites, all being indexed by people rather than bots. With this move, Facebook moved from a walled garden to a global, distributed Web platform that anyone could integrate and add to Facebook's index. Open Graph Protocol is the organizer of this index of Web metadata for Facebook.
Open Graph Protocol is certainly not necessary to be able to use social graph plugins. The plugins will still work, and Facebook will guess the data that it needs to populate in user news feeds and likes and Interests fields. However, if you want to be even more specific on how your articles and products appear in a user's news feed, help Facebook to index this data by specifying some simple Open Graph Protocol tags in your HTML.
Using OGP meta tags can help your Web site appear better in news feeds, likes, and Interests fields, as well as search results as users are searching throughout Facebook for relevant terms related to your ...
Get Facebook® Application Development For Dummies® now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
