og:keywords Is Not a Real Tag: What the OG Spec Actually Has

Direct answer first: <meta property="og:keywords"> is not part of the Open Graph protocol. It appears in no version of the spec at ogp.me, and no consumer of Open Graph data, not Facebook, not LinkedIn, not Slack, not X, reads it. Adding it to a page does nothing, and removing it loses nothing. If you found this page while auditing a template that includes it, you can delete the line with total confidence.

That's the answer. The more interesting questions are where this tag keeps coming from, what the protocol actually defines, and what to do with the keyword-ish intent behind it, because there is one real Open Graph-adjacent property for topical labels, and almost nobody uses it correctly.

Where og:keywords comes from

The tag is cargo cult markup with a traceable ancestry. For years, pages carried <meta name="keywords">, the classic keywords tag, until search engines stopped trusting it (Google confirmed as far back as 2009 that it ignores the tag for ranking, because it was abused into meaninglessness the moment it mattered). Then Open Graph arrived in 2010, and every <meta name="..."> tag gained a superficially parallel <meta property="og:..."> sibling: og:title, og:description, og:image.

Somewhere along the way, theme and plugin authors pattern-matched the two families together and emitted og:keywords alongside the real tags, presumably reasoning that if og:description exists, og:keywords must too. Other developers copied those templates, SEO checklist articles scraped the templates into "complete meta tag lists," and the fake tag reproduced. You'll find it today in WordPress themes, static site starters, and meta tag generators, which is exactly why people end up searching for whether it's real.

It isn't, and the pattern generalizes: the Open Graph protocol was never a mirror of the classic meta tags. It's a small, closed vocabulary defined at ogp.me, and anything outside that vocabulary is silently ignored by every scraper.

What the Open Graph spec actually defines

The complete set of basic and optional properties is shorter than most people expect:

| Property | Status | What it does | | --- | --- | --- | | og:title | Required | Headline on the share card | | og:type | Required | Object type: website, article, video, etc. | | og:image | Required | The preview image | | og:url | Required | Canonical URL for the shared object | | og:description | Optional | The one-to-two sentence card text | | og:site_name | Optional | The publication/brand line on the card | | og:locale | Optional | Language/region, e.g. en_US | | og:audio / og:video | Optional | Media attached to the object | | og:determiner | Optional | The word before the title ("an", "the"); almost never needed |

That's the whole core. No keywords, no author, no publish date, in the og: namespace itself. For the tag-by-tag implementation details, character guidance, and per-platform quirks, see our full meta property og reference.

article:tag, the real thing og:keywords wants to be

Here's the part templates get wrong in the other direction. When a page declares og:type of article, a second vocabulary comes into scope: the article: namespace, which includes article:published_time, article:author, article:section, and, the relevant one here, article:tag:

<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="article:tag" content="technical seo" />
<meta property="article:tag" content="open graph" />

One tag per meta element, repeated as needed. This is a legitimate spec-defined property, and it's the closest real relative of the imaginary og:keywords. Honest expectations, though: article:tag labels the shared object for platforms, and platforms have historically used such structured data unevenly. It is not a search ranking input, and stuffing thirty tags in accomplishes as little as meta keywords stuffing did. Where structured topical labeling genuinely earns its keep for search, it's in Schema.org markup, where an Article's keywords and about properties are read by systems that actually use them.

So where do keywords actually go in 2026?

If you came here trying to tell search engines what your page is about, the honest hierarchy is:

1. The title tag and H1. Still the strongest single statements of a page's topic. Our title length guide covers getting them displayed untruncated.
2. The content itself. Google derives topics from the words on the page and the queries the page satisfies, not from any self-declared keyword list. It ignores <meta name="keywords"> entirely for ranking, and og:keywords was never read by anyone.
3. Schema.org structured data. Machine-readable topical context that search engines document and consume: how to add it.
4. article:tag, if you want the shared-object metadata complete for platforms. Fine to include, just know its modest reach.

Meanwhile the two OG properties that actually move share performance, og:image and og:title, are the ones worth your audit time, because they decide whether a shared link renders as a rich card or a bare URL.

Check what your page actually declares

Auditing this takes under a minute: paste your URL into the OG Checker and it lists every og: and article: property your page serves, exactly as scrapers see them. Anything nonstandard, og:keywords included, shows up for what it is: a line no platform will ever read. Then preview how the real tags render as a card with the Social Media Preview tool.

While you're in there, the checks that pay: an absolute URL on og:image (relative paths are the top cause of missing preview images), an og:title under ~60 characters so cards don't clip it, and og:type set to article on posts so your article: properties are actually in scope.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is og:keywords a valid Open Graph tag?

No. The Open Graph protocol defined at ogp.me has never included a keywords property, and no platform's scraper reads it. It spread through copied page templates and meta tag generators, not through any spec. Pages carrying it lose nothing by removing it.

Does adding og:keywords hurt my SEO?

No. Unknown meta properties are simply ignored, by search engines and by social scrapers alike. The cost is a few wasted bytes and, more meaningfully, the false sense that keyword metadata has been "handled" when the tag does nothing.

What should I use instead of og:keywords?

Depends on the goal. For search engines: a clear title tag, content that covers the topic, and Schema.org Article markup with its keywords property. For social platforms on article pages: article:tag, the spec-defined topical label that og:keywords imitates. There is no working equivalent of a keywords list that influences Google ranking; that mechanism died with the classic meta keywords tag.

Does Google use the meta keywords tag at all?

Not for ranking in web search, and Google has said so explicitly since 2009. The tag was abandoned as a ranking input because it was trivially stuffable. A small caveat for completeness: some other systems (site search engines, some news products historically) have read it, which is why it still appears in CMS fields, but for Google SEO it's inert.

Which Open Graph tags actually matter?

Four required ones: og:title, og:type, og:image, og:url, plus og:description and og:site_name as the useful optionals. og:image has the most visible impact, since it decides whether shares render a card or a bare link. Run any page through the OG checker to confirm all six are present and resolvable.