Meta Tag Checker: Catch noindex mistakes.
We test 30 pages from your sitemap for the meta tags that decide indexing — robots noindex and canonical — plus 404s and redirects. Title and Open Graph checks aren't in the scan yet.
Why meta tags still matter (and which ones don’t)
Google said in 2009 that it ignores the meta keywords tag. Other meta tags still carry real weight: title drives click-through from the search results, meta description is often what Google shows below the title, canonical tells Google which URL to index, robots controls whether the page is indexable at all, and Open Graph + Twitter Cards control how the page looks when shared on social.
What to check on every page
Our scan checks two of these — robots (noindex) and canonical — on 30 pages sampled evenly across your sitemap, along with 404s and redirects. Title, description, Open Graph, Twitter Card and hreflang are not in the scan yet; use them as a manual checklist.
- Robots — no accidental noindex on pages that should be indexed. Checked by our scan, in the
robotsandgooglebotmeta tags and in theX-Robots-TagHTTP header. - Canonical — present, and pointing at the page itself or at the correct main version. Checked by our scan.
- Title tag — present, unique, and short enough (roughly 60 characters) to avoid being cut off in results.
- Meta description — present, unique, roughly 155 characters or fewer, written for people.
- Open Graph — og:title, og:description, og:image and og:url filled in.
- Twitter Card — at minimum a twitter:card type (summary or summary_large_image).
- Hreflang — for international sites, valid language/region codes and a self-reference.
Most meta tag bugs are template bugs
A single CMS template usually generates the same broken tag on thousands of pages, so fix the template, not the pages one by one. Duplicate titles and descriptions across many pages also make it harder for Google to tell those pages apart, and Google may rewrite them in search results.