Free Meta Tag Checker
One fetch, the whole head: title, meta description, robots, canonical, viewport, language and the social tags, plus a rough preview of how the result reads in search.
The six that do something
Meta tag checklists are long because listing tags is easy. Almost all of the effect comes from these:
title
The single most important string on the page. It is your headline in results, it is the browser tab, and it is what gets shared when nothing better is set. One per page, distinct from every other page on your site, most distinguishing words first.
meta description
Not a ranking factor. It is ad copy for a result you already earned, and Google rewrites it whenever it thinks page text answers the query better. Worth writing because with none, your snippet is always written for you.
meta robots
The one that can switch the page off. noindex removes it from the index and, in time, from crawling, which is why the noindex checker exists as its own tool: it also has to read the X-Robots-Tag header, which is not a meta tag at all.
canonical
Decides which URL gets indexed and which one your backlinks credit. Enough to it that the canonical checker covers the conflicting, cross-domain and header-declared cases properly.
viewport
width=device-width, initial-scale=1, or the page is rendered at a desktop width and scaled down on phones. Not an SEO tag exactly, but mobile rendering is how the page is assessed.
og and twitter tags
How the link looks when somebody posts it. Covered in depth by the open graph checker, including whether the image actually loads.
Tags people still add that do nothing
- meta keywords. Ignored by every major engine for well over a decade. Its only remaining effect is showing competitors your target terms.
- meta author, revisit-after, distribution, rating. No engine acts on them. Harmless, but they pad a head and give a false sense of completeness.
- A keyword-stuffed title. Not neutral, actively worse: stuffing makes a rewrite more likely, so the effort produces a title you did not write.
The reason to name these is that a checker reporting forty tags feels more thorough than one reporting eight, and thoroughness about things that do nothing is just noise wearing a suit.
Why the lengths here are approximations
This tool warns past roughly 60 characters for a title and around 160 for a description, and those numbers are conventions rather than limits. What actually truncates a result is pixel width: a title of capitals and wide letters is cut earlier than the same character count in narrow ones, and the container itself changes between devices and layouts. Any tool showing you a precise character limit has rounded off a fact it could not measure.
So treat the warnings as prompts, not failures, which is why they are never reported as broken here. The rule that survives all the uncertainty: front-load the words that distinguish this page, and the truncation stops mattering.
What a clean head does not buy you
Head tags are hygiene. They decide whether a page can be indexed, which URL earns the credit, and how the result reads once it appears. They do not decide whether it appears. A page with a flawless head and nothing to say ranks nowhere, and a page with a missing description and real authority ranks fine.
That distinction matters most when someone has just fixed every warning on a report like this one and is waiting for something to happen. The tags were never the constraint. What usually is, for a young site, is that no other site links to it yet, which is a different problem with a different fix.
Tags are a one-time fix. Backlinks are the part that decays.
Once the head is right it stays right, because you control it. The links pointing at your pages are on other people's sites: they get pruned, they flip to nofollow, the pages carrying them turn noindex. ShipDR reads every listing you track on a schedule and reports the day one changes.
- Every listing rechecked on a schedule, not once
- Live, dofollow and indexable, read from the page itself
- Told the day a backlink drops or flips
Adding a website and charting its Domain Rating is free, no card. The backlink engine is $10 once, per website, with no subscription.
Fair questions
Which meta tags actually matter?
Far fewer than most checklists suggest. The title element and the meta description shape your search result. The robots directive decides whether the page is indexed at all. The canonical decides which URL gets the credit. The viewport decides whether the page renders sanely on a phone, and html lang tells everyone what language it is in. The open graph and twitter tags shape how a shared link looks. Meta keywords does nothing; no major engine has used it in well over a decade.
Is the meta description a ranking factor?
No, and it has not been for a long time. It affects whether people click, not where you rank, which is worth more than it sounds: a result nobody clicks is a result that eventually moves down. Google also rewrites descriptions much of the time, choosing text from the page that matches the query better than your line did. Writing one is still worth it, because with no description Google always writes your snippet, and with one it sometimes uses yours.
How long should a title tag be?
The honest answer is that the limit is pixel width, not characters, so any number is an approximation. Around 60 characters is the widely used one and it is what this tool warns at. The practical rule matters more than the number: put the distinguishing words first, because truncation always eats the end, and a title that is unique on your site beats one that is the right length.
Do I need meta keywords?
No. Google has stated plainly that it ignores the tag, and it has been ignored for so long that its main remaining function is telling competitors which terms you are targeting. Removing it changes nothing; leaving it in changes nothing either, apart from the free intelligence.
Why does Google show a different title than the one I wrote?
Because it treats titles as a strong suggestion and rewrites when it thinks another string serves the query better, often pulling from your h1 or from prominent on-page text. Rewrites are more likely when the title is very long, stuffed with keywords, boilerplate across many pages, or missing entirely. The fix is not a trick: make the title a short, accurate, distinct description of that specific page.
Should every page have exactly one h1?
HTML5 permits several and Google has said repeatedly that multiple h1 elements are fine. The reason this tool still flags it is that in practice more than one usually means the heading order drifted while a template was edited, and headings are how both readers and machines follow the structure of a page. Treat it as a prompt to look, not as an error to fix.
The checker says everything is fine, so why is the page not ranking?
Because head tags are hygiene, not merit. They decide whether a page can be indexed, which URL gets the credit, and how the result reads once it appears. They do not decide whether it deserves to appear. A page with a perfect head still needs content that answers the query and enough backlinks for search engines to trust the domain. This tool rules out the cheap mistakes; it cannot rule in a ranking.