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Because when someone (or our social media team/agency) shares one of our pages on FB we want it to look nice.

• runarberg 5y ago
  Then a follow up question: Why are the scrapers on FB, Twitter, etc. so dumb? Why can’t they fall back to <title> if <meta name="og:title"> is missing? Why is it my job to make things look nice on their platforms, when all the metadata they require is already there?
  • Mauricebranagh 5y ago
    Optimal Titles are different lengths for different use cases for FB and Twitter ideally you want a call to action shorter title as compared to a longer optimised page <title>
    • runarberg 5y ago
      It still begs the question: What about the—in my experience—more common use case where they are the same (i.e. current title and description is sufficient for social shares)? Here is an example of a discord server refusing the expand the site description and title on one of my sites[1], just because there is no og:title and og:description (even though I provide both <title> and <meta name="description">). All I can take from this is either: a) Social media companies are bad at (or don’t care about) implementing common sense features, or b) Facebook is actively and aggressively pushing their own proprietary format over established standards. In either case it is bad. 1: https://forums.online-go.com/t/random-starting-position-flexible-komi/35771/19?u=runarberg https://forums.online-go.com/t/random-starting-position-flex...
      • collinmanderson 5y ago
        "og:title" falls back to <title>. My <title> tags include the title of the website _and_ the title of the page. I put _just_ the page title in "og:title". "og:image" has no standard alternative. The rest are usually not needed. og:description falls back to meta description just fine.