Meta Tag Analyzer

Three carry most of the weight: the title, which is the clickable headline in every search result; the meta description, which is the snippet beneath it; and the canonical link, which tells search engines which URL is the real one when the same page is reachable several ways.

Everything else is either a technical requirement or a presentation detail. The viewport and charset tags are close to mandatory — without a viewport, Google evaluates the page at desktop width on a phone, and without a declared charset the page can render as mojibake. The Open Graph and Twitter tags change nothing about ranking and everything about how a shared link looks.

Aim for 30 to 60 characters. Below about 30, you are usually leaving descriptive space unused; above 60, Google rewrites or truncates, often discarding the half you spent longest on.

The limit is measured in pixels rather than characters, so a title of wide characters such as CJK occupies more room than the same count of Latin letters. Treat 60 as a ceiling for Latin text rather than a guarantee, and put the distinctive words first, because only the front is reliably visible.

The description is not a ranking factor. It is the pitch shown under your title when the query does not trigger a featured snippet, and a well-written one can raise click-through rate more cheaply than any other on-page change.

Target 70 to 160 characters, lead with the specific benefit, and write it as an advertisement rather than a summary. Google frequently rewrites descriptions it judges unhelpful, which is usually a signal that the text is a list of keywords rather than a reason to click.

Open Graph tags are what Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, Discord and WhatsApp read when someone shares a link. The three that matter are og:title, og:description and og:image — without an image the share renders as a bare text link, which is the single most common reason a link preview looks broken.

Twitter tags cover X and a few others. twitter:card selects the layout, usually summary_large_image when you have a wide image. Platforms fall back to Open Graph values when a Twitter tag is missing, so a complete set of Open Graph tags covers both.

A canonical link names the preferred URL when the same content is served from more than one address — with tracking parameters, with or without a trailing slash, over http and https, or on a staging mirror. Getting it wrong splits your ranking signals across duplicates, so it is one of the highest-value tags to verify.

The robots meta tag is the more serious finding. A page carrying noindex cannot appear in search results at all, and if it is set while also being disallowed in robots.txt, a crawler can never see the instruction that would let it back in. A page with nofollow passes no authority to its outbound links, which matters on any page you built to recommend other sites.

It analyses the source you paste, nothing else. Tags injected by JavaScript after load are invisible, so a single-page app whose meta tags are set at runtime will report everything as missing when the crawler may see them perfectly well — view-source will not show them either.

It also cannot tell you what a crawler would actually receive. A canonical pointing to a redirecting URL, an image that returns 404, or a server that rewrites unknown paths to a 200 all pass this check and still fail in practice. Confirm anything important with Search Console, which reports what Google has actually indexed.