Social sharing previews

Preview text left as a template placeholder

One of the 136 checks Lala SEO runs on every page of a site in a free audit.

How serious
Worth knowing. Small, or only matters in some cases. Read it and decide.
Score
Reported, but it does not lower your site's score.
Based on
Industry standard: Google does not document this one, so the check follows established practice.

What is wrong

When you share a page on social media, the platform pulls in a preview that includes a headline, description and thumbnail image. If your page still has template code instead of real text in those fields, visitors see placeholder text like "{{description}}" or "[INSERT PREVIEW TEXT HERE]" instead of something meaningful about your page.

Why it costs you

This stops people clicking through from social media. They see generic or broken-looking text and assume the link is either unfinished or spam, so they scroll past. You lose the traffic that social sharing could bring you.

How to fix it

Find and replace the placeholder text in your page's Open Graph tags and Twitter Card tags. These live in the `<head>` section of your HTML. Look for `og:title`, `og:description`, `og:image`, `twitter:title`, `twitter:description` and `twitter:image`. If you use a template system, fix these fields in the master template file so the real page data fills them in automatically on every page, rather than editing each page by hand.

What the audit tests

  • The link preview title is real text, not an unfilled template value
  • The link preview description is real text, not an unfilled template value

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Other social sharing previews checks

All 136 checks