With Facebook
we have the Open Graph tags
that allow webmasters to specify how the story is displayed on Facebook.
Is there something similar for the Google +1
button, that allows webmasters to specify the thumbnail image, description and title? Google+
seems to be ignoring the og-meta tags
.
Images that are too small or not square enough will not be included in the +Snippet, even if explicitly referenced using schema.org microdata or Open Graph markup. Specifically, the height must be at least 120px, and if the width is less than 100px, then the aspect ratio must be no greater than 3.0.
Just answered this on another post Google +1 Generated Thumbmail in Profile
Looks Like Google+1 has the following data hierarchy:
Hope this helps.
From Google+ help docs, we now have an official answer.
Google uses schema.org microdata to generate rich snippets in search (and in Google+). There's a lot written about schema.org and how it relates to Facebook OpenGraph in these two links:
See: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1211158 See: https://developers.google.com/+/plugins/+1button/
Some important bits:
meta og:image works, secret is to have image large enough. It failed at 140x112 and work when I change to bigger thumbnail 511x364
Google appears to be using the Title and Description of the page, in standard meta tags. It seems to have no way of specifying a thumbnail, however.
I am working on this, and Google+ wasn't picking up my OG tags.
When I put:
<body itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Article">
into the HTML it started to pick them up.Hope this saves someone some time!