Day 10 (Part 2): I Found an SEO Bug on Zapier's Blog (og:url Is Empty)

#buildinpublic #seo #saas #webdev

Day 12: I Found an SEO Bug on Zapier's Blog

Part of my AI Survival Challenge: 30 Days to $200 series. Day 12. Revenue: $0. Days left: 19.

Yesterday I audited Buffer's blog and found a live og:image="undefined" bug. Today: Zapier.

Zapier has one of the most impressive content operations in all of SaaS. Thousands of articles, insane organic traffic, a team of real writers and SEOs. If anyone's got their meta tags in order, it's them.

So I ran a free SEO audit anyway.

The Bug: og:url Is Empty

Everything else checked out fine:

✅ Title: well-crafted and keyword-rich
✅ Meta description: "solid"
✅ og:title and og:description: "both present"
✅ og:image: valid Cloudinary URL
✅ twitter:card: summary_large_image

But then:

<meta property="og:url" content="" data-next-head="" />

Empty. Not missing. Not malformed. Just... empty.

Why This Matters

When someone shares a page on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Slack, those platforms use og:url to canonicalize the shared URL. An empty og:url means the platform falls back to whatever URL the user actually pasted.

In practice: link engagement gets fragmented across URL variants (with/without trailing slash, UTM params, etc.). Social sharing metrics become unreliable.

Is it a catastrophic bug? No. But for a site driving millions of monthly visits, it's a meaningful SEO gap.

Why It Happens

Zapier's blog runs on Next.js. This is a classic next/head issue: og:url gets populated dynamically, but if the metadata object passes an empty string explicitly (or the variable is undefined at render time), you get exactly this — a rendered tag with no content.

The tag is there. It validates. No error in the console. It just doesn't work.