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Prepare your content

Learn how to optimize your website content for accurate scraping and topic extraction by using data attributes and meta tags in Optimizely Content Recommendations.

You can improve the quality of scraped content by using data-epi-type attributes to control what gets extracted, and meta tags to provide additional metadata.

Annotate your content with data-epi-type attributes

Use data-epi-type attributes to specify which elements the scraper should extract. This helps exclude navigation, footers, and other non-article content from topic analysis.

  • data-epi-type="title" – Marks the primary title
  • data-epi-type="content" – Marks the main body content

If you use multiple data-epi-type="content" blocks, they are concatenated during extraction.

Example

<html>
  <head>
    <meta property="og:title" content="Getting Started with Content Recommendations" />
    <meta property="og:description" content="Learn how to implement personalized content recommendations." />
  </head>
  <body>
    <header>Site navigation - excluded from extraction</header>
    <h1 data-epi-type="title">Getting Started with Content Recommendations</h1>
    <div data-epi-type="content">
      <p>This is the main article content that will be analyzed.</p>
      <p>All paragraphs within this div are included for topic extraction.</p>
    </div>
    <footer>Footer content - excluded from extraction</footer>
  </body>
</html>
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Note

Content Recommendations collects meta tags separately from data-epi-type attributes. Both extraction methods work independently.

Provide metadata with meta tags

The scraper collects meta tags from your pages for content categorization and rendering in recommendation widgets.

Open Graph tags

You can use the following Open Graph tags:

  • og:title – Page title
  • og:description – Page description
  • og:image – Primary image URL
  • og:image:secure_url – Secure image URL variant
  • og:image:alt – Image alt text
  • og:locale – Content locale
  • og:region – Geographic region
  • og:type – Content type
  • og:url – Canonical URL
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Note

The tag og:image:alt is stored as og:image_alt.

Article tags

The scraper collects all tags starting with article:. Common tags include:

  • article:published_time – Publication date (must be ISO 8601 format with a timezone)
  • article:category – Content category
  • article:tag – Content tags (you can have multiple)

Custom tags

The scraper collects all tags starting with idio:. Use these for custom metadata:

<meta property="idio:author_id" content="12345" />
<meta property="idio:content_tier" content="premium" />

Nested fields

idio:* and article:* tags support nested fields. For example, idio:content:category is stored as metadata.idio.content.category.

Multiple meta tags with the same property are stored as an array, including the following example:

<meta property="idio:content:category" content="Technology">
<meta property="idio:content:category" content="Software Development">

This is stored as the following:

{"idio": {"content": {"category": ["Technology", "Software Development"]}}}

You cannot use a field as both a direct value and a container for nested fields. For example, if you set idio:content:tier to "premium", you cannot also use idio:content:tier:category because tier is already assigned a value.

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Note

Article and custom tags work with both property and name attributes.

Example

<meta property="og:title" content="How to Optimize Content Recommendations" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Best practices for content recommendations." />
<meta property="og:image" content="https://www.example.com/images/guide.jpg" />

<meta property="article:published_time" content="2025-02-03T15:19:00.000-05:00" />
<meta property="article:category" content="Technology" />
<meta property="article:tag" content="Content Recommendations" />
<meta property="article:tag" content="Personalization" />

<meta property="idio:author_id" content="12345" />
<meta property="idio:content_tier" content="premium" />

Updated 18 days ago

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