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Will other services other than Facebook use Open Graph tags when scraping the page for sharing information?

Meaning, if I have an AddThis button (for example) on a page, which allows sharing to Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest etc., will any of the other services also honor those meta tags? Or is generally something we do specifically for Facebook?

Mark Amery
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JasonStoltz
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3 Answers3

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The answer appears to be yes... sort of.

Since Open Graph is an open protocol of sorts, it's not meant to be Facebook specific. And it appears that while not all vendors may respect the tags yet, most do.

Take Pinterest for example. If you use the "Pin" button provided by AddThis, it will use the "og:image", "og:description", and "og:url" tags. However, through my own experimentation, the Pinterest bookmarklet and adding directly through their site does not appear to use the open graph metadata.

As for Google Plus, that's answered here. Basically, they give "schema.org" the highest weight, but if they do not exist they will fall back on open graph tags, and if they do not exist they will fall back on page content, like "title", etc.

Community
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JasonStoltz
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The Open Graph protocol is supported by a wide range of social platforms which includes:

  1. Facebook
  2. Pinterest Developers
  3. Linkedin
  4. Twitter
  5. Google Plus
Simon Hayter
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  • I read twitter does not use it, you need special tags: https://moz.com/blog/meta-data-templates-123 – gunslingor Mar 03 '16 at 20:42
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    Twitter will use them too. "When the Twitter card processor looks for tags on your page, it first checks for the Twitter property, and if not present, falls back to the supported Open Graph property" https://dev.twitter.com/cards/getting-started#opengraph – Regis Frey Jun 17 '16 at 23:53
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Embed.ly also parses Open Graph tags (see an example here), thus (possibly) also their customers, such as: TweetDeck, bit.ly, hunch, Yammer, Reddit, etc.

MPV
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  • Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with Embed.ly in any way. I just ran into their page today and it seems they're providing a good service. :) – MPV Jan 24 '13 at 18:27