You spend an hour writing the perfect post. You craft the hook, nail the copy, pick the right time to publish — and then you paste the link. Suddenly the preview that appears is a blurry thumbnail from 2019, a title that cuts off mid-sentence, or worse, a completely blank card with nothing but the raw URL. Your carefully written post now competes with a first impression that screams "ignore me."
This isn't bad luck. It's a structural problem with how link previews work — and it affects every platform from LinkedIn to Discord. The good news: it's completely fixable.
What Is a Link Preview?
When you paste a URL into Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Discord, the platform's crawler visits that page and reads special HTML tags called Open Graph (OG) tags. These were introduced by Facebook in 2010 and are now a de-facto standard across every major platform. The crawler looks for three things:
- og:title — the headline shown in the preview card
- og:description — the supporting text underneath
- og:image — the thumbnail image displayed
If those tags are present and well-formed, the platform renders a rich preview card that draws the eye and earns the click. If they're missing, malformed, or haven't been updated in years, you get whatever the platform's fallback logic produces — which is rarely flattering.
Why Most Links Look Bad
OG tags are the website owner's responsibility. That means when you share a link, you're at the mercy of how well — or how poorly — the destination site has implemented them. Common problems include:
- Missing og:image — the platform shows a grey placeholder or nothing at all
- Low-resolution or wrong-ratio images — designed for desktop, cropped awkwardly on mobile
- Stale og:title from an old version of the page that never got updated
- Generic og:description like "Welcome to our website" that was set once and forgotten
- Missing tags entirely — especially common on legacy CMS sites and older WordPress installs
Even well-maintained sites often have OG tags that are technically correct but brand-agnostic — they describe the page, not your reason for sharing it. A product page for running shoes might have a perfectly valid og:image of those shoes, but that's not the image that will make your audience stop scrolling.
Affiliate and Third-Party Links: The Biggest Offenders
If you're sharing affiliate links, partner content, news articles, or any URL you don't control, the preview problem gets dramatically worse. Affiliate redirect links — the kind that look like link.example.com/ref/12345 — often have zero OG metadata because the redirect layer doesn't implement it. The preview card either shows nothing or inherits metadata from the destination, which may not match your promotional angle at all.
- A fitness supplement affiliate link that shows a generic brand logo instead of the product
- A software tool referral link that previews to a sign-up page with no description
- An e-commerce partner link where the image is a warehouse photo, not the product shot
- A news article share where the og:image is a column author headshot instead of the story photo
These previews kill engagement before your audience even reads your caption. Studies consistently show that posts with rich, relevant media outperform text-only posts by 2–3x in click-through rate. A bad link preview effectively makes your link look like a text-only post.
Platform Differences: Not All Previews Are Equal
To make matters more complicated, each platform renders link previews differently. What works on one may look completely different on another:
- Twitter/X — shows a large image card with title and description. Requires specific image dimensions (1200×630px recommended) and will crop aggressively if they differ.
- LinkedIn — shows a more compact card with a smaller thumbnail and truncates descriptions quickly. Often caches previews for days, making real-time changes slow to appear.
- Facebook — renders the richest preview but has a strict image scraper cache that requires the Sharing Debugger tool to refresh.
- Discord — shows an embed with accent color, title, description, and image. Ignores some standard OG tags in favor of its own embed spec.
This means there's no single "set it and forget it" OG tag configuration that looks perfect everywhere. A link preview strategy has to account for the platform mix your audience actually uses.
The Fix: Take Control of Your Link Previews
The solution is to add a metadata layer between you and the destination URL. Instead of sharing the raw link — and letting the destination site control what social platforms see — you create a hosted preview page that defines exactly the title, description, and image you want. Social crawlers read your custom metadata; real visitors get instantly redirected to the original destination. This is exactly what Prelinq does.
With Prelinq, you paste the destination URL, pick (or upload) the image that will actually stop the scroll, write the title and description that match your angle — and get a shareable link at prelinq.com/x/yourslug that renders your preview on every platform. The experience for the person clicking is seamless: they see your custom card, click, and land on the destination page without any noticeable redirect.
- Share an affiliate product link with a high-quality lifestyle image instead of the retailer's default
- Promote a news article with a custom headline that frames it for your audience
- Run a campaign where every link in your bio looks on-brand, regardless of the destination
- Test different preview images on the same destination URL to see which drives more clicks
The free plan gives you two active Prelinqs to test the concept. Pro and Business plans remove the limits and add analytics — so you can see exactly how many clicks each custom preview generates, where those visitors came from, and which platforms are driving the most traffic.