http://www.wsj.com/articles/google-uses-its-search-engine-to-hawk-its-products-1484827203
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No great surprise.
Why should Google give it’s competitors even treatment against it’s own products?
I throw an average of €100 a month at adwords.
The figure is set at €125 but in low season I used to reduce it to around €50.
Forgetting the paid ads results (of which we frequently appeared) our first page search position would entirely depend on our current adwords budget.
i.e. the more we were spending the higher up our business would appear in general search.
Initially to save some cash in very low season I used to remove the ad. We would instantly lose our first page position in general search even for quite specific search terms.
I don’t have a problem with this (though I understand the EU bureaucrats are looking into some sort of unfair advantage in the same vain as Microsofts Internet Explorer dominance years back when it was bundled with Windows).
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When we build websites we typically want people to find them. This is called website promotion among other things. For the longest time, like since the beginning of Search Engines, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been one way to improve your position on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
As the SE Spiders get better at visiting websites and the algorithms continue to get better it is becoming harder to be found more than the next guy. Sure there are a lot of tricks, some white hat, some black hat, but they no longer get the job done. Perhaps even penalize you. Pretty much anymore there are no tricks.
Then along came open graph tags and social media. It was “another” way to promote your website. Write a great article and people will share it and promote you to their friends and so on.
But as Google, the king SE has decided it is better to promote its own products on the SERPs well, as the saying goes, “then there was one” just social media remains the easiest and best bet for promoting your website.
So since we build websites it is important to know these things or we will be building websites for the heck of it.
We simply have to include the Open Graph tags on every page we want to be shared. Write amazing content, make delicious videos and display pretty photos. Simple right? Quality content takes time to make but not having the correct code to display it to the world makes it worthless.
That is what it has to do with RapidWeaver.
BTW: The most basic tags needed are these below. The others tags (here are a lot) help but this is the least and basic for content driven websites. If you are a business you will need geographic/location tags. If you are a store you will need some more. Do the research, it is all over the internet.
<!-- OpenGraph -->
<meta content="Your Page Title Goes Here" property="og:title">
<meta content="Your page description goes here, keep it short and to the point" property="og:description">
<!-- ****** Guidelines for the images: 1200x630 pixels, less than 1MB. ****** -->
<meta content="https://www.your-website-name.com/featured.jpg" property="og:image">
<meta content="https://www.your-website-name.com//index.htm" property="og:url">
<!-- Twitter -->
<meta content="summary_large_image" name="twitter:card">
<meta content="@twitterusername" name="twitter:creator">
All the best!
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I confess to being totally confused by this no doubt totally useful list. Are these items that should be built into the RW file, or are they somehow appended to Social Media posts?
If the former, the page title and description are already built into RW. As well as notating and describing images.
If not, then I am beyond confused. I am clueless.
They should added to each of your website pages just like the title and description tag. Here is an article that might help you understand the whys. Or it will make even more questions. Either way, just read up on it.
Are you on Facebook? People share articles all the time. When you see articles on Facebook that interest you and you want to share them. You want people to do this for you too. In order to do that your article has to look good. The code I shared is what is needed for it to show up in Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and others. Here is a brief overview.
Just Google how to use OpenGraph tags. Here is the Open Graph Website
It will take some time to understand it all. Just give yourself time and fill your brian with info. Eventually you find out it is simple and quick. Perhaps someday @dan and RapidWeaver will be able to autofill these with presets, urls and featured images and logos, but until then it can easily be done manually.
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Thanks so much for your speedy response.
The reading recommendations are going on my “to do” list. Clarity, however, is not assured.
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I am going to assume you are baiting me but just in case you are not.
Flash - should the code for these read “go:description” or “og:description”, etc. on the tags? It looks like the spell check changed several of them from og to go. 
Gotta love spell check! :-(. og is correct! Good catch. Fixed.
Thanks again for posting those though - it was very helpful to see just which OG tags are needed. Was just adding them to a page and noticed the evil spell check change. 
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I agree, Social Media plays a vital role in promoting any brand/service/product.