#10942 – OpenGraph tags within an article

Hi

In my articles in Joomla 3 with sh404SEF I used to insert OpenGraph tags directly, using the Regular Labs Sourcerer extension.

Can I ask why you were doing that instead of just using sh404SEF, which did most of that automatically and let you manually customize OpenGraph and Twitter Cards data manually?

My second question is: are the OpenGraph tags og:type, og:image:alt and og:locale still necessary or useful?

Not really. The only really important OGP tag is og:image. Because when sharing over social network, the image is what attracts attention. Title  is the next most important thing and then description. 

My first question is: does this depend on Joomla 

Joomla does not do anything about OGP or Twitter Cards.

or on 4SEO?

4SEO has full support for generating automatically and letting you manually customize these metadata. You can manually customize them from the admin, or directly on the frontend (just like other metadata).

Now I see that the OpenGraph tags og:title, og:description and og:url are ignored and the Joomla data is used instead.

Unless you manually customize them, then yes, 4SEO will use the page title and description. It will also automatically identify the page image and build the og:image tag.

There's usually nothing wrong with using title and description from the page: if it's good for SEO, it's good for social. Some people do want to have separate titles/description/image for social networks compared with regular content, but that's a super-optimization, requiring much work.

This is all explained here on the 4SEO social networks configuration documentation page.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Hi again,

Documentation on manually customizing OGP data in the admin is here.

Same for metadata customization on the frontend.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

Hi

Simply because I could not effort the cost of sh404SEF for all my websites.

sh404SEF was just one subscription for an unlimited number of sites ;)

But to be honest, I like the possibility of getting what I want without using extensions.

Joomla does not offer any way to handle OpenGraph tags. And you were using an extension, Sourcerer, which is a fine extension but is kinda of a hacky way to do that. 

The benefit of something like 4SEO is that it's way more efficient, because all the data is stored in one place, and read only once per page load: structured data information, opengraph data, custom metadata, canonical: it's just one row to read in the database. You only compute things once. It can't be more efficient than that.

But the big thing here is whether all this is automated or not. With an extension such as 4SEO, structured data and OpenGraph data are entirely automated. This is very important for most websites owners, as clients will not understand the need, or take the time to fill-in additional fields after writing some content. 

So it's super-important in my view that this SEO-metadata is generated automatically, and you only customize them manually on the rare occasion where something is not working, or you want a more specific content.

Sometimes, an extension is the right answer!

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr