How long does OpenGraph take to show nice website previews?

  • Resolved codimex

    (@codimex)


    6 years ago

    Hi! First of all, congratulations for this plugin. Users seem sooooo satisfied with it, and that’s why I decided to switch to The SEO Framework from that plugin-which-must-not-be-named. ??

    My question comes from my unexperience in SEO, and maybe it’s a dumb one. I’ve entered the SEO Title, SEO Description and OpenGraph image (feels weird not entering the supposedly needless SEO Keywords) for a couple of pages (homepage and a test one). Copy-pasting the URL on a WhatsApp message or Facebook post doesn’t return the expected nice preview of the link. :”(

    Things that may be relevant:

    1) I’m on a multilanguage site, URL-structured as: https://www.mupyp.mx/es/* and https://www.mupyp.mx/en/* (using Sublanguage plugin)
    2) My website is under construction.

    My final questions: Can OpenGraph return values to display a nice website preview even if the website is under construction or in multilanguage mode? How long do the Google snippets and Facebook/WhatsApp preview take to update with those values to display correct values?

    I don’t know if I made myself clear, but thank you in advance for reading my issue.

    • This topic was modified 6 years ago by codimex. Reason: Typo
Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Plugin Author Sybre Waaijer

    (@cybr)

    Hi there, and welcome! ??

    Networks communicate via various protocols, UDP, TCP, HTTP, etc. Via those protocols, we can send information, like your website’s text and images. For HTTP, to simplify, we send out a header first, and then the content (body).

    In WordPress, we reserve the HTTP-header for simple semantic communication, like if the page is found, if we should redirect the visitor, if we encounter an error, and more; we can even send additional information via plugins, but that can easily lead to issues.

    So, for The SEO Framework, we only use the HTTP-header for redirecting the user or engaging the sitemap. In the HTTP-body we write out XHTML meta tags.

    These meta tags are used to communicate with Facebook, Twitter, Bing, and Google. They are hidden inside the head of the content of your website. To view them, right-click on any page and select “view source”.

    For example, a description meta tag, that Facebook and Google can read, looks like this:

    <meta name="description" content="I'm a description!" />

    Because you’ve enabled an “under-construction” plugin on your website, robots and regular visitors can’t see the meta tags unless they log in as an administrator. Essentially, the plugin locks everyone out from seeing those tags. In other words: No, your pages won’t be shared with The SEO Framework’s information until you disable the “under-construction” mode.

    Some details on sharing:

    • WhatsApp parses the metadata on the sender’s device the moment it’s entered. So, it’s likely that the correct values will always be shown when shared.
    • Facebook stores the metadata on their servers (cache); it’s unknown for how long, but if you must, you can clear it here.
    • Search engines cache the metadata on their servers until they pass by your page again.
    • Twitter refreshes its cache every hour or so, and only reparses images if the image URL changes.

    For a more technical breakdown, please visit my blog post on this topic:
    https://theseoframework.com/about/validating-your-websites-metadata/

    I hope you’ve learned something today ?? Cheers!

    Thread Starter codimex

    (@codimex)

    WOW!!! Quite a detailed answer! THANK YOU for taking the time to give light to my question. I wish all support forums were like this.

    1) Oh, although I knew about the OG metadata when viewing the source code, for some unknown reason I didn’t do it until you suggested me to (shame on me!) and you’re right: all the OG metadata seem correctly stored. ??

    2) I already tried Facebook’s debugging tool even before posting my original message. I’ll do it again when the site goes live.

    THANK YOU again for taking the time to answer me. All is clear now. Congratulations for your plugin and keep up with the good work!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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