Twitter Cards in action

Twitter Cards in action:
I first wrote about Twitter Cards in June, when Twitter had just announced them, today I got a tweet from Paul Savage who noticed that they were now enabled for yoast.com. That’s super awesome news as it means that the implementation I did in my WordPress SEO plugin works.
Of course I had to do some tweaking afterwards, because as it turns out Twitter’s scraper for the Twitter Card data is easily confused (it doesn’t understand how to parse multiple og:images meta tags). But let me show you what it means if it works well; if you tweet an article from this site, you’ll see a normal tweet with a new “View Summary” link:

When you click that View summary link, the link “expands” and you’ll see this, the complete Twitter Card:

As you might notice my Twitter account is there twice, the top one is because I’m the author of that article, the second one is because I set the @yoast account as the main account for this site. So if you see an article tweeted that’s been written by Michiel, you’ll see his twitter account on top and the main @yoast account in the bottom:

Can I have Twitter Cards for my site?

I know you’re asking yourself that question. I tested some sites that are running my SEO plugin on which I knew the Twitter Cards implementation in it is activated, but unfortunately couldn’t find any working examples outside of my own site yet. It seems that you really have to apply to participate with your site next to having the functionality active on your site (you can activate it on the SEO -> Social menu).
So, the next step is another update of my SEO plugin which improves a bit on the current Twitter Card implementation now that I can test properly, expect that somewhere early next week. This update will also rely on OpenGraph when activated too where possible so you don’t have another 10 lines of Twitter meta data but instead only 3 or 4 lines for Twitter and the rest of the data coming from OpenGraph. Looking forward to seeing this work on other sites that run my SEO plugin!
Twitter Cards in action is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!


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