Meta Tag Checker
Fetch a page and review its title, description, canonical URL and other metadata.
Based on: WHATWG HTML Living Standard · Google Search Central — Title Links +3 more
About this validation
Checks a page's title, meta description, canonical URL, robots directive, viewport, charset, language, and H1 against the HTML Living Standard, and flags title/description issues (missing, duplicated, or outside the length search engines typically display) against Google's own documented guidance.
- Protocol / standard:
- Search engine behavior:
- Rules reviewed:
- Sep 8, 2026
SEOTechTests methodology: Data source: a live fetch of the page performed by SEOTechTests, parsing its <head> elements. Structural checks (is a tag present, unique, well-formed) are validated against the HTML spec; length/quality guidance for titles and descriptions reflects Google's documented behavior, which other search engines are not guaranteed to match exactly.
Standards and vendor-documented behavior can change. This reflects the source as last reviewed above, not a permanent guarantee.
FAQ
Why does a title or description get flagged as 'too long'?
Search engines truncate or rewrite titles and descriptions that exceed the space available in a search result snippet. This checker flags lengths outside Google's documented guidance as a warning, not an error -- the tag is still valid HTML, but part of it may not be shown as written.[2, 3]
Does a missing canonical tag mean the page has a duplicate content problem?
Not necessarily. A canonical tag is optional -- its absence just means the page doesn't explicitly declare its own preferred URL. It matters most when the same content is reachable at more than one URL (with or without trailing slash, query parameters, etc.).[4]
What does the meta robots directive control, and how is it different from robots.txt?
The meta robots tag (and X-Robots-Tag header) controls indexing and link-following for that one page after it has already been crawled, e.g. noindex or nofollow. robots.txt, by contrast, controls whether a crawler fetches the page at all. A page can be crawlable but still excluded from the index via meta robots.[5]
Is passing every check here a guarantee of good search rankings?
No. This checker validates that metadata is present, well-formed, and within documented length guidance -- it doesn't measure content quality, backlinks, or the many other factors search engines weigh when ranking a page.