Meta Tag Checker
What is being read
The tags in the page's <head> that decide how it appears in search results and in a
shared link. What a plugin shows you in the editor is what it intends to output; this
reads what the server actually sent, after every filter, cache layer and optimisation
plugin has had its turn. The two disagree more often than people expect.
Lengths, and what they are for
Google does not truncate at a character count — it truncates at a pixel width, and it rewrites titles whenever it judges its own version more useful. The lengths here are a guide, not a rule:
- Titles beyond roughly 60 characters usually get cut. Put the distinguishing words first.
- Descriptions beyond roughly 160 characters usually get cut. The description is not a ranking factor; it is the sentence that earns the click.
A description that ends mid-word costs nothing in position and a great deal in click-through.
The canonical is the one that surprises people
A canonical tag pointing somewhere else tells search engines to credit that other address instead of this one. It is the correct answer for genuine duplicates and a silent catastrophe when set by mistake — most often by a migration that copied a staging URL, or a plugin filling in a site-wide value. If a page will not appear in search no matter what you do, check this first: fixing the canonical URL.
noindex is the other one worth reading carefully. It keeps the page out of the index
entirely, and it is set by accident more often than deliberately — see
site not showing in Google.
Open Graph and Twitter tags
These decide what a shared link looks like. Without them, each network builds its own preview from whatever it finds on the page, which is rarely the image you would have chosen. An image that is missing, too small or blocked to the network is the usual reason a shared link looks broken while the page itself is fine.