Pinterest has published several methods that website owners can use to provide information for their Rich Pins format, including the standard Open Graph meta tags. Open Graph meta tags generally include the title, description, one or more images, but can also include product details, author information, etc. This past week I found a serious incompatibility between Pinterest’s support of the ‘article:author’ meta tag, and that of Facebook (the leading proponent of the Open Graph standard).
- The Open Graph protocol website describes the ‘article:author’ value as a “profile array – Writers of the article”.
- Facebook describes the ‘article:author’ value as “An array of Facebook profile URLs or IDs of the authors for this article”.
- And Pinterest describes the value as “Article author, all line breaks and HTML tags will be removed”.