Free tool Meta tag generator: robots, canonical and Open Graph tags for the head
Fill in the fields and copy a head snippet that is escaped, ordered and complete: title, description, canonical, robots rules, viewport, Open Graph, the X card and hreflang lines. The checklist catches the mistakes that quietly cost traffic, such as a relative canonical or noindex on a page you want found.
- Follows Google’s robots rules
- Copy or download
- Runs locally
Build the head snippet
The sample is a product category page with a UK, a US and a German version. Change any field; the code and the checklist update as you type.
Shown as the headline in search results and on the browser tab.
A one or two sentence summary. Search engines may use it as the snippet.
The preferred, absolute URL of this page. Leave empty if you do not need one.
Optional. Google does not use it for ranking; leave empty unless another system needs it.
How large an image preview search engines may show.
Maximum snippet length in characters. 0 = no snippet, -1 = no limit. Empty = not set.
Maximum video preview in seconds. 0 = still image only, -1 = no limit.
Browser toolbar color on some mobile browsers, e.g. #1f6f5c.
Language code and URL, e.g. en-GB https://example.com/uk/. Include this page itself. Use the hreflang generator for a full check.
Absolute URL, ideally 1200 × 630 px.
Optional, e.g. @yourbrand.
Title characters
58
Title width (px)
570
At 20 px Arial; Google desktop shows about 600.
Description characters
140
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<title>Handmade Ceramic Mugs – Free UK Delivery | Example Pottery</title>
<meta name="description" content="Stoneware mugs thrown and glazed by hand in our Bristol studio. Dishwasher safe, 350 ml, twelve glazes. Free UK delivery on orders over £40.">
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/mugs/">
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow, max-image-preview:large">
<meta name="theme-color" content="#1f6f5c">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="https://www.example.com/mugs/">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-US" href="https://www.example.com/us/mugs/">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://www.example.com/de/tassen/">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://www.example.com/mugs/">
<!-- Open Graph -->
<meta property="og:type" content="website">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://www.example.com/mugs/">
<meta property="og:title" content="Handmade Ceramic Mugs – Free UK Delivery | Example Pottery">
<meta property="og:description" content="Stoneware mugs thrown and glazed by hand in our Bristol studio. Dishwasher safe, 350 ml, twelve glazes. Free UK delivery on orders over £40.">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://www.example.com/img/mugs-1200x630.jpg">
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Example Pottery">
<!-- X (Twitter) -->
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@examplepottery">Paste inside <head>. Keep the charset line first.
Checklist
- OKTitle: 58 characters, about 570 px wide, within the roughly 600 px Google shows on desktop.
- OKDescription: 140 characters, about 890 px wide, a typical length.
- OKhreflang: 3 language versions with valid codes. Put the same lines on every one of those pages.
- OKNo conflicts found.
Share these inputs: the values go after the # in the link, so they never reach a server.
https://tapcub.com/tools/meta-tag-generator
Version v1.0Updated Update history
What each part of the snippet does
The tags fall into four groups. Search engines read the first two; browsers and share previews use the rest.
Title and description
The <title> is the main candidate for the headline in results and the tab name. The description may become the snippet. The counters show characters and width so you can see a cut coming before it happens.
Canonical and robots
The canonical says which URL is the original when the same content lives at several addresses. The robots tag says whether the page may be indexed, whether links are followed and how much of the page may be previewed. These are the lines with real consequences if they are wrong.
Browser tags
charset and viewport make the page render correctly; theme-color tints the toolbar on some mobile browsers. They do not affect rankings, but a missing viewport makes a page unusable on phones.
Sharing and languages
Open Graph and the X card decide how the link looks when shared; hreflang tells search engines which language version to show to whom. Each has its own tool here for a deeper check.
Order matters little to search engines, with one exception: the charset declaration should come first in the head so the browser reads everything after it with the right encoding.
Three steps
Fill in only what you need; empty fields produce no tag.
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1
Write the title and description
Use the counters: about 600 px of title and 920 px of description show on Google desktop. Leave the canonical as the page’s own clean URL.
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2
Choose the robots rules
Most pages need index, follow and nothing else. Use noindex for thank-you pages, internal search results and duplicates you cannot remove; add max-image-preview:large if you want large images in Discover.
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3
Copy or download
Paste the snippet inside
<head>, or into your CMS or framework’s head settings. Then fix anything the checklist flags in red or orange.
Robots meta rules Google supports
From Google’s robots meta tag specification. Rules can be combined with commas in one tag, are case-insensitive, and can also be sent as an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header for PDFs and other files.
- When rules conflict, the more restrictive one applies: nosnippet beats max-snippet:50
name="robots"applies to all crawlers;name="googlebot"only to Google- Robots rules are only read if the page is not blocked in robots.txt
| Rule | Effect | Note |
|---|---|---|
noindex | Keep the page out of results | Takes effect after the next crawl |
nofollow | Do not follow links on the page | Applies to every link on the page |
none | Same as noindex, nofollow | |
nosnippet | No text snippet or video preview | A static thumbnail may still show |
max-snippet:[n] | Snippet of at most n characters | 0 = none, -1 = no limit |
max-image-preview:[size] | none, standard or large | Discover large images need large |
max-video-preview:[n] | Video preview of at most n seconds | 0 = still image, -1 = no limit |
noimageindex | Do not index images on the page | |
notranslate | No translated version offered in results | |
unavailable_after:[date] | Drop the page after a date | ISO 8601, RFC 822 or RFC 850 |
noarchive | Ignored by Google | Still read by Bing |
The sample, line by line
What the generator produced for the sample product category page and why each line is there.
| Line | Value | Why |
|---|---|---|
<title> | 58 characters, 570 px | Fits the roughly 600 px Google desktop shows; brand at the end |
description | 140 characters, 890 px | Within about 920 px, so the delivery offer at the end survives |
canonical | /mugs/ as an absolute URL | Filtered and sorted variants of the category point here |
robots | index, follow, max-image-preview:large | Indexable, and allows large image previews |
hreflang | en-GB, en-US, de, x-default | Lists itself (en-GB); x-default sends everyone else to the UK page |
og:*, twitter:card | Image, site name, large card | X falls back to og:title and og:description, so they are not repeated |
The example avoids two common traps: the canonical is the page’s own URL rather than the home page, and the en-GB page appears in its own hreflang list.
Head tags that backfire
These do more damage than a missing tag, because they look fine in the browser and only show up as lost traffic weeks later.
noindex left from staging
A site launched with the staging template still carries noindex everywhere. Check the robots line on every template after launch.
Every canonical points home
A hard-coded canonical to the home page asks Google to treat every page as a duplicate of it. Each page’s canonical should usually be itself.
Blocking and noindex together
Disallowing a page in robots.txt and adding noindex means crawlers never fetch the page, so they never see the noindex and the URL can stay indexed.
Duplicate tags from plugins
A theme and an SEO plugin each adding a description or canonical leaves two conflicting values. View the page source and keep one.
Check that the right pages get found
After you ship new head tags, watch what happens: whether search traffic arrives on the pages you meant, and which crawlers fetch them.
Search performance
Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster in one view: clicks, impressions and position by query and page.
Learn moreCrawlers on their own line
Search engine bots and AI crawlers are counted separately from people, so a crawl spike never inflates visitor numbers.
Learn moreLanding pages and 404s
Entry pages, exit rates and 404s with the referrer that sent people there.
Learn moreMeta tag questions
Still have a question?
Chat with the team behind TapCub — we usually reply within a few hours on business days.
Which meta tags matter for SEO?
Few: the <title> element, the meta description (for the snippet, not for ranking), the robots meta tag when you need to restrict something, and the canonical link. Viewport matters for mobile usability. Open Graph and hreflang matter for sharing and multilingual sites.
Do I need a robots meta tag on every page?
No. Without one, search engines treat the page as index, follow. Add it only when you want to restrict something, such as noindex on a thank-you page or max-image-preview:large to allow large previews.
What is the difference between noindex and robots.txt?
robots.txt controls crawling: whether a bot may fetch the URL. noindex controls indexing: whether a fetched page may appear in results. To remove a page from results, allow it to be crawled and use noindex; a page blocked in robots.txt can still be indexed from links.
Should the canonical point to the page itself?
Usually yes. A self-referencing canonical is a clear hint when the same page is reachable with tracking parameters, sorting options or trailing-slash variants. Point it elsewhere only when this page really is a duplicate.
Does Google still use the meta keywords tag?
No. Google said in 2009 that it does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking. It does no harm, but it is not worth maintaining for Google.
Is noarchive still useful?
Not for Google, which ignores it since it removed cached pages. Bing still supports it, and Bing’s guidelines say it also keeps the page’s content out of Copilot answers, so it can still matter there.
Why does X not need twitter:title?
X reads the matching Open Graph property when a twitter: tag is missing, so og:title, og:description and og:image cover it. You only need twitter:card, and optionally twitter:site.
Is anything I type sent to TapCub?
No. The snippet is built in your browser. The share link stores the fields after the # in the URL, which browsers do not send to servers.
Update history
New features, fixes and data refreshes for this tool, newest first.
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· v1.0
LaunchedFirst release.
Missing something or found an error? Tell us — requests that come up often go into the next update. All tool updates
See what the new tags change
Connect your site and Search Console, and compare search clicks and landing-page visits before and after you ship new head tags.