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The picture shown when your links are shared actually loads
seo.social-image-broken
Why this matters
A page can name the image to use when somebody shares it, and that image can quietly stop existing — renamed in a redesign, deleted with an old media library, moved when the site changed platform. The tag stays behind pointing at nothing. Every share after that is a bare grey link with no picture, and the owner is the last person on earth to find out, because they look at their own site rather than at what their link looks like when somebody else posts it.
Who fixes it
You can, usually
Roughly how long
20 minutes
Care needed
Low risk to change
How to fix it
Open the address in this finding in a browser. If it 404s, upload the image again at that address or point `og:image` at where it lives now — it must be an absolute address, not a relative one, because the platform fetching it has no page to resolve against. Then paste your page into Facebook's Sharing Debugger and press Scrape Again, which clears the cached bare version.
How we score it
Failing this check takes up to 10 points off your search score. It is a fact about your site rather than a measurement, so it reads the same on every scan until you change something.
Does your site pass this one?
This check runs on every scan, along with the other 106. Free, no account, and you see the evidence for each result.
Check my siteOther search checks
- Canonical tags point somewhere validA canonical tag tells Google which address is the real one for a page. When it points somewhere wrong — another domain, a dead page, or the wrong protocol — Google follows it anyway, and the page you wanted indexed can be dropped in favour of one that does not exist.
- Content has been updated recentlySome content is meant to sit still, and age alone is not a fault. But prices, opening hours and staff pages that have not been touched in over a year are usually wrong by now — and a visitor who acts on the wrong opening hours does not come back to check whether the rest was right.
- Descriptions are a sensible lengthLong descriptions get truncated mid-sentence; very short ones waste the space you are given.
- Each page has exactly one title tagA page can only have one title. When there are several, the browser and Google each pick one — and they do not always pick the same one, so what you see in the tab may not be what appears in search.
- Each page has one main headingSeveral top-level headings makes the structure of the page ambiguous. Worth checking rather than urgent — modern HTML permits it, and Google handles it, but it usually signals that headings are being chosen for their size.
- Every page has a main headingThe h1 is the headline of the page. Without one, both visitors skimming and search engines parsing the page have nothing telling them what it is about.