Meta Tag Checker
Titles, descriptions and canonicals.
Checked from our server. One location, so results show reachability from there only.
What the meta tag checker does
Every page carries a few lines in its <head> that visitors never see but search engines, browsers and social sites read closely. The meta tag checker fetches a page and pulls those lines out for you: the title, meta description, canonical link, robots rules, viewport, language, character set, favicon and any hreflang links to other language versions.
It’s handy after a redesign or a move to a new CMS, when a template change can quietly drop a description or add a stray noindex. It’s also a quick way to see why Google shows an odd snippet for a page.
How to use the meta tag checker
- Paste the page URL.
- Press Check tags. We fetch the page from our server, follow up to five redirects, and read its HTML.
- Work through the issues list, then check the table of tags found.
Understanding the results
The line at the top counts the things worth fixing; lines marked as information are suggestions rather than faults. The title and description each show a character count. You’ll get a warning when a title runs past 60 characters or is under 15, and when a description runs past 160 characters or falls under 70. A missing description is a warning, not a failure: Google still builds a snippet from the page text, but you lose control of what it says.
Two findings need attention straight away. A noindex rule keeps the page out of search results, and the checker looks for it both in the robots meta tag and in an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header. A canonical link that points to a different address tells search engines to credit that other URL instead. That’s right for a duplicate and wrong for a page you want ranked on its own. The table also lists your Open Graph title and image; to see how a shared link will actually look, try the Open Graph preview.
Questions
How long should a title and description be?
Titles of about 50–60 characters and descriptions of about 120–155 usually show in full in Google. Write for people first.
What does noindex do?
It asks search engines not to list the page. It’s useful for private or duplicate pages and a mistake on pages you want found.
My site builds its page with JavaScript. Will this work?
We read the HTML the server sends and don’t run scripts, so tags added later by JavaScript won’t appear.
Why do I get an error instead of results?
We only analyse a page that loads with a success status. If it answers with an error such as 404 or 500, or sends something other than a web page, such as a PDF, the checker tells you so rather than guessing.
Is there a size limit?
We read the first 1 MB of HTML. On a bigger page the issues list says so, and any tags placed after that point won’t be found.