How Should I Optimise Feature Images for Google+ Interactive Post Snippets?

[KraigWalker]

Hi there, I'm in the middle of optimising my site to create decent sharing snippets to improve the overall experience and quality for visitors.

One thing I've come up against though is trying to balance site design with the requirements of schema.org and Google+

I've recently just altered the layout of my site to now visually display a brief post description to go into the Rich Snippet Google+ creates, but the images Look a little bit shorter than what they could be.

I'm curious to how I could perhaps serve a dedicated image for the Google+ snippet (a square cropped version of the large feature image that's given to each post) while avoiding forcing all users to load a second image I don't even really want to show.

I'm also in the middle of deciding what content to prefill the post text with, I'm thinking about tagging my own Google+ id and maybe using some post relevant hash tags too. Does that sound like a good idea?

Thanks for

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[TakeshiYoung]

You can use OpenGraph markup for images that you want to use as a preview in Google, but don't want displayed on the page:

Just place that code in the header, and the image will show up as one of the options when you share your link on G+.

[KraigWalker]

thanks for pointing this out. I've actually decided for the sake of giving each service the best consistency to use a separate thumbnail for Google using schema, and keep the landscape image for Open Graph, as it looks better in Facebook. The thumbnail is a mere 7Kb in size, and I actually took out a 50Kb font variant after finding it wasn't being used.

Thanks for the advice though

[KraigWalker]

UPDATE

I've discovered you can put schema.org meta data into meta tags, just like open graph using the content variable, for example: