Web & SEO Tools

Handy helpers for building and optimizing websites — generate SEO meta tags, robots.txt files, and other on-page essentials.

About these web & seo tools

Search engines truncate page titles by pixel width, not by character count, which is why advice to keep titles under sixty characters is only roughly right. A title in capitals or full of wide letters is cut off well before sixty; one full of narrow letters survives past it. The same applies to meta descriptions, where the limit is nearer 920 pixels than any particular number of characters, and where the engine frequently ignores what you wrote and generates its own snippet from the page anyway — the description is a suggestion, not a specification. The second thing worth knowing is that the meta keywords tag has done nothing for well over a decade. Google confirmed in 2009 that it ignores the tag entirely, and every other major engine followed. It still turns up in templates and in advice written by people recycling advice, and filling it in is harmless but pointless. The third is that a page can be indexed while being blocked in robots.txt, which surprises people who use robots.txt to hide things. Blocking a URL stops it being crawled, not being indexed — if other pages link to it, the engine can list the URL without ever having read it, which is how confidential pages end up in results with no description under them. The tool for keeping a page out of an index is a noindex directive on the page itself, which requires the crawler to be ALLOWED in to read it. The two mechanisms work against each other, and using both means the noindex is never seen.

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