Facebook open graph meta tags maximum content length

Question

Does anyone know the maximum valid length for each of Facebook's open graph meta tags?

The description of the meta tags on http://ogp.me/ does not list maximum lengths, only general descriptions such as "A one to two sentence description of your object" for the og:description meta tag.

From what I understand, there is no maximum content length for meta tags in general, just recommendations to keep them under certain lengths for SEO reasons.

I'd be curious to know if there is a hard limit and what the limits are for what is visible on a link posted to Facebook.

Solution 1

There isn't a hard limit on the data you can put there, but in various rendering places Facebook will limit it. The limit in news feed is different from the limit in Ticker which is different than the limit on timeline.

Just put the correct content in there and we'll truncate it when rendering.

Solution 2

In my testing:

og:title 40 chars

og:description has 2 max lengths:
When the link is used in a Post, it's 300 chars. When a link is used in a Comment, it's 110 chars.

So you can either treat it as 110, or, write your Descriptions to 300 but make sure the first 110 is the critical part and still makes sense when it gets cut off.

Solution 3

Here's a good link regarding this topic: http://www.joshspeters.com/how-to-optimize-the-ogdescription-tag-for-search-and-social

Regarding Facebook it says:

"Right now Facebook only displays the first 300 characters of a description so if your primary audience is on Facebook write your OG:Description tag accordingly."

Comments

[Dave Brace]

Thanks for the info! Is there any information available on how many characters fit before truncation occurs in the news feed?

[Paul Tarjan]

Just test it out. The rules change all the time to fit the current for factor.

[Dave Brace]

Makes sense. Appreciate the response!

[Chris Moschini]

If it changes this often it'd be nice if Facebook published these numbers and kept them up to date, instead of saying, "Go fish."

[Stefan Huska]

the link is dead.

[Alexey]

there is a hard limit: 10000 characters

[Alexey]

This is the error that graph returns when this limit is exceeded: caption parameter cannot be longer than 10000 characters

[Lambart]

@StefanHuska it's alive today

[Lambart]

Seems to be very dynamic now. I just made a post with a 91-char title (which wasn't cut off), above a 121-char description (which was cut off at 102 chars). Posting the same link as a comment, the title was cut off at 81 chars and the description was completely missing.

[Dave Land]

The link is dead, but the page is available on the Internet Archive. Unfortunately, the information is out of date.