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August 14, 2022 07:16 pm GMT

I tested every link preview meta tag on every social media and messaging app so you don't have to! It was super boring!

The first part of a series on redundant <head> tags you can read here: get out of my <head>

Social media is a bad for your mental health, your privacy, your democracy and for the performance of your website.

Peak at the source code of most websites, look between the <head> tags, and you're likely to see a bunch of meta tags like this:

<!-- Meta tags generated by metatags.io --><title>Meta Tags Preview, Edit and Generate</title><meta name="title" content="Meta Tags Preview, Edit and Generate"><meta name="description" content="With Meta Tags you can edit and experiment with your content then preview how your webpage will look on Google, Facebook, Twitter and more!"><meta property="og:type" content="website"><meta property="og:url" content="https://metatags.io/"><meta property="og:title" content="Meta Tags Preview, Edit and Generate"><meta property="og:description" content="With Meta Tags you can edit and experiment with your content then preview how your webpage will look on Google, Facebook, Twitter and more!"><meta property="og:image" content="https://metatags.io/assets/meta-tags-16a33a6a8531e519cc0936fbba0ad904e52d35f34a46c97a2c9f6f7dd7d336f2.png"><meta property="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image"><meta property="twitter:url" content="https://metatags.io/"><meta property="twitter:title" content="Meta Tags Preview, Edit and Generate"><meta property="twitter:description" content="With Meta Tags you can edit and experiment with your content then preview how your webpage will look on Google, Facebook, Twitter and more!"><meta property="twitter:image" content="https://metatags.io/assets/meta-tags-16a33a6a8531e519cc0936fbba0ad904e52d35f34a46c97a2c9f6f7dd7d336f2.png">

The purpose of these tags is to tell messaging and socialmediaapps how to display link previews.

Link previews let people know about a link before they click on it. They display a url's title, description, and sometimes an image.

Here's an example of a link preview being displayed in iMessage:

CIA Realizes It's Been Using Black Highlighters All These Years

How to create link previews

There are four popular systems for creating link previews:

These systems also have more than one way of being implemented. (See the table below)

All these systems involve placing code snippets between the <head> tags of your page.

Adding these code snippets helps bots run by facebook, twitter, and other apps, build link previews of your site.

But, this code also weighs down your website for all your human visitors and many websites implement three or four of these methods.

You could just not have any of these tags that's fine.

But assuming you want link previews of your website to be displayed what is the most effective combination of these tags?

That's something the world needed to know so I built linkpreviewtester. It's probably the most boring tool anyone has ever made and I really hope someone finds it helpful!

Which meta tags work on which apps?

This table shows the results of using the linkpreviewtester on some of the most popular social media and messagingapps. It shows which <meta> tags display link previews on which apps.

Open graph tags are the clearwinner

I was hoping to discover that one of the open source methods schema.org or oEmbed worked well on enough of these apps that I could recommened them.

But it seems the clear winner is Facebook's Open Graph tags.

Here's the same example from metatags.io without redundant tags. It goes from 1.335 kB to 729 bytes in size.

<title>Meta Tags  Preview, Edit and Generate</title><meta name="description" content="With Meta Tags you can edit and experiment with your content then preview how your webpage will look on Google, Facebook, Twitter and more!"><meta property="og:type" content="website"><meta property="og:url" content="https://metatags.io/"><meta property="og:title" content="Meta Tags  Preview, Edit and Generate"><meta property="og:description" content="With Meta Tags you can edit and experiment with your content then preview how your webpage will look on Google, Facebook, Twitter and more!"><meta property="og:image" content="https://metatags.io/assets/meta-tags-16a33a6a8531e519cc0936fbba0ad904e52d35f34a46c97a2c9f6f7dd7d336f2.png">

What if i don't want Facebook or Twitter proprietary meta tags polluting my lovely website?

Facebook and Twitter are basically evil so it's understandable if you don't want to use their tags.

You could just use a meta description tag, and learn to live with there being no images in your website's link previews

<title>Get out of my &lt;head&gt;</title><meta name="description" content="An incredible website for testing meta tags">

or, you could use a combination of meta description, Schema.org microdata and oEmbed JSON the combo which will work on the most number of apps, without using proprietarytags.

<head lang="en" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/WebPage">    <title>Link Preview Test | Title Tag</title>    <meta name="description" content="Test Description | Meta Description  This description came from the meta description tag"/>    <meta itemprop="name" content="Test Title | Schema.org Microdata Title"/>    <meta itemprop="description" content="Test Description | Schema.org Microdata  This description came from Microdata using Schema.org Schema"/>    <meta itemprop="image" content="/previews/microdata.png"/>    <link rel="alternate" type="application/json+oembed" href="https://getoutofmyhead.dev/oembed_link.json" title="Test Title | oEmbed JSON Title Attribute"/></head>

Why have I done this?

I've been building a website missingdice.com with a strict page size limit of 12kB saving data has become a bit of an obsession and so has finding out what <meta> tags are actually useful.

I've collected my research into a series of articles which will be published on getoutofmyhead.dev.

Let me know if you're interested in learning more, or if you find this at all useful!


Original Link: https://dev.to/shadowfaxrodeo/i-tested-every-link-preview-meta-tag-on-every-social-media-and-messaging-app-so-you-dont-have-to-it-was-super-boring-39c

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