How to Fix Broken Social Share Previews (OG Tags)

A prospect shares a client's homepage on LinkedIn and the preview is a blank rectangle with a garbled title. The page itself is fine. The brand looks amateur. This is an OG tag failure, and it happens on a surprising number of agency-managed sites.

Open Graph (OG) tags are the <meta> properties that control what LinkedIn, Facebook, Slack, WhatsApp, and iMessage display when someone pastes a URL. Getting them wrong is cheap to fix and expensive to ignore — every shared link is a micro ad impression, and a broken one destroys it.

Why Shares Render Blank or Wrong

Three failure modes account for almost every bad preview:

1. Missing tags entirely. No og:image means the platform picks an arbitrary image or shows nothing.
2. Relative image URLs. og:image must be an absolute URL (https://example.com/og.jpg). A relative path (/og.jpg) breaks every crawler that doesn't know the domain.
3. Wrong image dimensions. The canonical size is 1200 × 630 px. LinkedIn crops to 1.91:1; Twitter/X uses the same ratio for summary_large_image. An image that's too small gets rejected or pixelated.