Meta tag checker
Checks titles against 30–60 characters and meta descriptions against 70–160.
What TMOD checks
- Every crawled page's title tag, measured against a 30-character minimum and a 60-character maximum.
- Every meta description, measured against a 70-character minimum and a 160-character maximum.
- Missing titles and missing descriptions, reported per page rather than as a site-wide count.
- Duplicate titles across pages, which usually means a template is not filling in the page-specific part.
Why it matters
The title tag is the strongest on-page relevance signal you directly control, and it is the headline of your search result. It does two jobs at once, and a title written only for one of them usually fails at the other.
The 30–60 character range is about what survives display. Search results truncate on pixel width rather than character count, but 60 characters is a reliable proxy, past it, the end of your title is replaced with an ellipsis, which is where people put the part that would have earned the click. Under 30 characters you are usually leaving relevance on the table.
Meta descriptions do not affect rankings. They affect click-through rate, which affects traffic, and Google frequently rewrites them anyway when it thinks a passage from the page answers the query better. A good description is still worth writing because it is the one you get when the query matches what the page is actually about.
How to fix it
01Front-load the title
Put the distinguishing words first. If the title is truncated, what remains should still identify the page. Brand suffixes belong at the end, and on a site with a long brand name, consider dropping them from deep pages entirely.
02Fix duplicate titles at the template
Identical titles across many pages nearly always means the template is not interpolating the page-specific variable, and the pages behind them are often flagged as near-duplicates for the same underlying reason. That is one change that fixes every affected page at once, so find it before editing pages individually.
03Write descriptions that set an expectation
Say specifically what the page delivers. A description that could apply to any page on any site earns nothing. Include the concrete detail, the number, the format, the constraint, that tells someone this is the right result.
04Let Google write the ones you would not
For pages where a description would just repeat the first paragraph, omitting it is a legitimate choice, Google will generate one from the page, often matched to the query. This check will flag it as missing; that is a warning you can knowingly accept.
Writing a title that survives the result page
Truncation is by pixel width, not character count, so a title full of capitals and wide letters is cut earlier than one of the same length in lowercase. Sixty characters is a proxy that holds up well enough to build a check on, and the practical instruction it stands for is to put the distinguishing words first and let the ellipsis eat something you can afford to lose.
Brand suffixes are the usual candidate. On a homepage the brand is the point; on the four-hundredth article it is fourteen characters of repetition on every result. Dropping it from deep pages is a reasonable choice, and so is shortening it, since nothing requires the title tag to match what your logo says.
Keep the title and the H1 close in meaning but not necessarily identical. The title is written for someone scanning ten results who has not arrived yet; the H1 is written for someone who has. Where they disagree wildly, Google tends to rewrite the title, and where the title promises something the page does not deliver, the click is wasted on both sides.
The rest of the head, and what belongs in it
Four tags do real work beyond the two checked here. The canonical, which decides which URL is the one that counts. The meta robots directive, which is the only reliable way to keep a page out of the index. The viewport, without which a phone renders your desktop layout and scales it down. And the charset declaration, which decides whether the rest of it parses at all.
Open Graph and Twitter card tags do no ranking work whatsoever, and they are still worth having. They control what appears when someone pastes your URL into a message, a post or a chat, and the difference between a card with a title and image and a bare grey link is measured in whether anyone follows it. Structured data is the same shape of investment: no direct ranking effect, and eligibility for result formats you cannot otherwise get. The technical audit covers both.
What does not belong: meta keywords, ignored since 2009. Revisit-after, which no crawler has ever honoured. Author and copyright meta tags, which are inert. A head full of dead tags costs nothing except the impression that the site was configured by copying a tutorial from a decade ago, and it crowds out the four that matter.
One template, four titles, before and after
Most title problems on a site come from one line in one template, so here is that line and what it produces. The pattern is %POST_TITLE% | Best Gardening Tips and Advice Blog Online. For a post called Growing Tomatoes, that renders a 58-character title where 42 characters are the suffix, and for anything with a longer post name, the result page shows Growing Tomatoes From Seed Indoors | Best Gardening Ti... with the ellipsis eating the suffix that was never earning anything anyway. Multiply by every post on the site: hundreds of results all ending in the same truncated boilerplate.
The rewrite inverts the priorities. Growing Tomatoes From Seed: Timing, Depth and Temperature runs 57 characters, survives intact, and every word of it distinguishes this page from the other nine results. The brand suffix is simply gone from article pages, kept on the homepage where the brand is the point. That is one template edit, and it changes what a searcher sees for the entire site at once.
Descriptions follow the same logic. Welcome to our blog where we share tips and tricks about gardening and much more is 81 characters that could sit under any page on any site, so it earns nothing and invites Google to substitute its own snippet. Sowing depth, soil temperature and a week-by-week timeline from seed tray to transplant, plus the two watering mistakes that kill most seedlings runs about 150 characters and tells the searcher precisely what clicking buys. The first version describes a website. The second describes an answer.
The report is built to find the template problems before the page problems. A cluster of identical titles is one interpolation bug, and the same template is usually behind the pages flagged as near-duplicates. Forty missing descriptions on tag archives are not forty writing tasks, they are one decision about whether those archives should be indexed at all. Fix at the template level, re-crawl with the full audit, and then the handful of pages still flagged are the ones genuinely worth hand-writing. Do those in order of search impressions, because a better title on a page showing up for a thousand queries a month is worth a hundred rewrites on pages nobody sees, and the result-page copy is the one place where a single line of text has a measurable click-through effect.
Questions
Do meta keywords matter?
No. Google has ignored the meta keywords tag since 2009 and it is not checked here. If your CMS still has a field for it, leaving it empty costs nothing.
Google is showing a different title than the one I set. Why?
Google rewrites titles when it judges its own version more useful for the query, commonly when your title is heavily truncated, keyword-stuffed, or does not match the page's actual content. The fix is not to fight it: a clear, accurate, appropriately short title is rewritten far less often.
Should every page have a unique meta description?
Every page that matters should. Duplicate descriptions across many pages are a signal that the template is generic, and they waste the one piece of result copy you fully control. For low-value pages you would not miss in search, omitting the description is more honest than duplicating one.
Do keywords in the title still matter?
Yes, as relevance rather than repetition. The phrase a page targets belongs in the title once, where it reads naturally, because the title is a strong signal of what the page is about. Repeating it, or listing variants separated by pipes, stopped working years ago and is now one of the patterns that triggers Google to rewrite the title entirely. One clear statement of the topic beats three attempts at the same keyword.
Is it risky to change titles on pages that already rank?
Changing a title is normal and search engines re-evaluate it within days; there is no penalty attached to the act itself. The risk is directional: a rewrite that makes the title less accurate about the page can lose the queries the page was winning. Change titles to describe pages better, one template or one page at a time, and note the date, so that if a page's clicks move afterwards you know which change did it and can read whether the trade was good.
Read more
Why Moz Shows 404 Errors for Pages You've Removed
Moz may show 404 errors for removed pages because old URLs can still be discovered, crawled, or linked from other sites.
Screaming Frog, Ahrefs and Sitebulb for AdSense readiness
The big SEO crawlers are better at technical auditing than any AdSense tool. They are also scoped to a different question. Here is where the line falls.
Search Console vs a site crawler, and what each one cannot tell you
One reports what Google decided about your site. The other inspects what your site actually serves. Neither answers the other's questions.