Skip to content

og:description

Wygard watches the content of the <meta property="og:description"> tag and alerts you when the summary shown in social and chat link previews changes.

Scope Tier Default Alert
Per URL Basic Off — enable via the OG group 🟠 Heads-up

Why it matters

og:description is the blurb under the headline when your URL is shared on social platforms and chat apps. It's separate from the <meta name="description"> used in search results, so a template or plugin change can rewrite it — or leave it blank — while your SEO meta description stays untouched. A missing og:description makes shared links look thin and cuts click-through from social.

The default severity is Heads-up. The test is off by default and belongs to the OG selection group.

What Wygard checks

On every run, the crawler:

  1. Fetches the monitored URL.
  2. Extracts the content attribute of <meta property="og:description"> from the <head>.
  3. Compares the found value against the stored desired value.
<meta property="og:description" content="Catch SEO issues early, keep your organic sales growing.">

Common alerts

  • og:description changed — the tag now carries different text than the baseline.
  • og:description not found — the tag was removed, so previews fall back to whatever the platform scrapes.
  • Multiple og:description tags — more than one was detected; scrapers pick one unpredictably.

Responding to an alert

  1. Open the alert and review the diff — Wygard shows the previous value and the new one.
  2. Decide whether the change was intended (a copy update) or accidental (a template regression, a plugin that stopped emitting the tag).
  3. If intended, click Set found value as desired to adopt the new text as the baseline.
  4. If accidental, restore the tag in your template and let the next crawl turn the test green.

Enable the whole OG group

Link-preview tags tend to break together. Enable the OG selection group to watch og:title, og:description, og:image, and og:url as one set.