I fixed the tags but the old preview still shows. Why?

Caching. The platform stored the preview the first time anybody shared the link and will keep serving it until something forces a refresh. Facebook's Sharing Debugger and LinkedIn's Post Inspector both re-fetch on demand, and that is usually the missing step rather than anything wrong with your tags.

Do I need different tags for Twitter or X?

It reads Twitter Card tags if they are present and falls back to Open Graph if they are not. For most business sites the Open Graph tags alone are enough, and adding a separate set is optimisation rather than a requirement.

Does having these tags help my Google ranking?

No, not directly. Open Graph tags govern how a link renders when shared. They are a sharing and click-through improvement rather than a ranking factor, and anybody selling them as SEO is stretching it.

Free tool

How does your link look when somebody shares it?

When your page is pasted into WhatsApp, LinkedIn or Slack, those apps look for three tags to build the preview card. If they are missing, your link appears as a bare address with no picture. We check whether yours are there.

We read the page, its headers, its certificate and its public DNS records. We do not log in, we do not probe admin paths, and we identify ourselves in your server logs as OxwynXRay.

We check the tags, the platforms decide the picture

This reads the Open Graph tags your page publishes. It does not fetch your image to confirm it loads, check its dimensions, or render what each platform will actually draw. Every platform applies its own crop, its own fallbacks and its own cache, and several change that behaviour without announcing it. So a pass here means the tags are present, which is necessary and not sufficient. Before you rely on it, run the page through Facebook's Sharing Debugger and LinkedIn's Post Inspector, which show you their real rendering and let you clear their cache.

What the apps are actually looking for

Open Graph tags. A title, a description and an image, declared in the page head. They were designed by Facebook and are now read by almost everything that turns a link into a card: WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Slack, Discord, Signal, Teams. One set of tags covers nearly all of them.

Why a bare link costs you more than it looks

A link with a picture and a headline occupies real space in a conversation and tells the reader what they are about to open. A bare address tells them nothing and looks, at a glance, like something that might not be safe. The same link, shared by the same person, to the same people, performs very differently depending on which one they see.

The image is the part people get wrong

The tags are often present but the image is missing, the wrong shape, or hosted somewhere the platform cannot reach. The usual target is 1200 by 630 pixels. Too small and it is ignored or shown as a thumbnail, and a picture that only makes sense at full size becomes unreadable once cropped into a card.

Why the fix rarely holds

Platforms cache aggressively. Fix the tags and the old preview can persist for days, which is why people conclude the fix did not work and give up. Each platform publishes a debugger that forces a refresh, and using it is part of the job rather than an optional extra.

Questions

I fixed the tags but the old preview still shows. Why?: Caching. The platform stored the preview the first time anybody shared the link and will keep serving it until something forces a refresh. Facebook's Sharing Debugger and LinkedIn's Post Inspector both re-fetch on demand, and that is usually the missing step rather than anything wrong with your tags.
Do I need different tags for Twitter or X?: It reads Twitter Card tags if they are present and falls back to Open Graph if they are not. For most business sites the Open Graph tags alone are enough, and adding a separate set is optimisation rather than a requirement.
Does having these tags help my Google ranking?: No, not directly. Open Graph tags govern how a link renders when shared. They are a sharing and click-through improvement rather than a ranking factor, and anybody selling them as SEO is stretching it.

This tool is one part of the full X-Ray, which measures security headers, your certificate, speed, indexability and what your site publishes about itself. Same scan, same free report.