Meta tags
Publishers have the option of providing metadata to Parse.ly with a series of meta tags as opposed to JSON-LD. When these meta tags are used, they will take precedence over any JSON-LD existing on the page. Thus it’s possible to use both repeated meta tags and JSON-LD on the same page. For example, the value of parsely-type will take precedence over any @type value specified in JSON-LD if both values are present.
Note
The Parse.ly Crawler doesn’t execute JavaScript, so regardless of which metadata format you choose, the information must be accessible in the actual source of the page. For more, check out our detailed crawler information.
Example
Add tags like these to the <head> element of all tracked pages.
<meta name="parsely-title" content="Iron Man Revealed" />
<meta name="parsely-link" content="https://www.example.com/post/iron-man-revealed" />
<meta name="parsely-type" content="post" />
<meta name="parsely-image-url" content="https://www.example.com/tony-stark.png" />
<meta name="parsely-pub-date" content="2024-01-22T18:01:00Z" />
<meta name="parsely-section" content="Defense News" />
<meta name="parsely-author" content="Peter Parker" />
<meta name="parsely-author" content="April O'Neil" />
<meta name="parsely-tags" content="editor: jjjameson, tony stark, stark industries, iron man" />Field description
| parsely-title | Post or page title (article headline) |
| parsely-link | Specifies the Parse.ly canonical URL for post or page. For page groups like galleries, it should always point to the main article. For accurate data, the canonical URLs for the social networks (link rel=”canonical” and og:url) must match or resolve to this URL. For more information, please refer to the documentation here. |
| parsely-image-url | URL of the image associated with the post/page. |
| parsely-type | Page type, which must be one of the following strings: post or index (frontpage and sectionpage are deprecated and are functionally identical to index). See distinguishing between “posts” and “pages” for help deciding which value to use. |
| parsely-post-id | String that uniquely identifies this post. Unless otherwise instructed by Parse.ly support, should be omitted in favor of parsely-link. |
| parsely-pub-date | Publication date, formatted as an ISO 8601 UTC timezone string. |
| parsely-section | Section the page belongs to (e.g. “Programming”). Note that only 1 section value is supported per URL. Therefore, it is recommended that the top-level section or category is used and any sub-sections or child categories are added to parsely-tags. |
| parsely-author | Author who wrote the post. This field can be repeated for each author in a multi-author post. |
| parsely-tags | String of comma-separated keywords associated with the post (e.g. “statistics, zipf, internet, behavior”). These will map to “Tags” in the Parse.ly dashboard. Note that up to 100 parsely-tags values are supported per URL. |
| parsely-metadata | Arbitrary data to attach to post for use in Parse.ly’s API. Must be a valid JSON-serialized string. See documentation about custom metadata. |
Technical Caveats
Handling special characters. The only supported way to use special characters (such as single or double quotes) is with an HTML entity. For example, "headline": ""Analyst" found guilty of relying solely on ""anecdata""" will return a headline of "Analyst" found guilty of relying solely on "anecdata". This is different from our guidance for metadata in JSON-LD.
Values in the meta tags will appear literally inside Parse.ly Analytics. Remember that all metadata is case-sensitive. String values supplied here (specifically parsely-title, parsley-author, and parsely-section) as well as list values (specifically parsely-tags) will appear in Parse.ly analytics exactly as they are specified in the tag. As a result, make sure to use proper capitalization and specify the values as you expect them to appear. Values with variations (example: “John Smith” and “john smith”) will appear separately in the Dashboard causing duplication and skewed data.
The Parse.ly meta tags cannot be loaded asynchronously. The Parse.ly crawler will not execute JavaScript. It must be able to access the meta tags from the results of a single GET request.
Last updated: September 26, 2024