Basics: what every page needs Basics
Title, description, canonical and robots decide whether and how a page appears in search. Most errors show up here, and they are the quickest to fix.
1What is it?
The Basics section reads the most important meta data from the page head: title, meta description, canonical, robots (meta and X-Robots-Tag), language, charset, viewport, favicon and hreflang.
2Why it matters
Title and description are your text in the search result. Canonical prevents duplicate content, robots decides about indexing. A wrong noindex removes the page from search completely.
3What TagSpion checks
| Check | Rating |
|---|---|
| Title | green 30 to 60 characters · yellow shorter or longer · red missing |
| Meta description | green 70 to 155 characters · yellow shorter or longer · red missing |
| Canonical | green points to itself · yellow points elsewhere · red missing |
| Robots | red for noindex or nofollow, also via X-Robots-Tag |
| lang, charset, viewport | red if one is missing |
| hreflang | yellow if the back reference to the page itself is missing |
| Favicon | yellow if none is declared |
4How to fix it
- Every row has a "Fix" button with ready-made code. Copy it into the page head (<head>).
- Write a unique title and description per page, the most important part first.
- Canonical always as an absolute URL with https and without parameters.
<title>Trattoria Bella - Italian restaurant in Munich</title> <meta name="description" content="Fresh pasta, wood-fired pizza and 120 Italian wines in Munich-Schwabing. Open daily from 11:30, reservations online."> <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/en/restaurant/"> <meta name="robots" content="index, follow"> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> <link rel="icon" href="/favicon.ico"> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://www.example.com/de/restaurant/"> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://www.example.com/en/restaurant/">
5Frequently asked questions
Why does TagSpion show a different title than Google?
Google sometimes shortens or rewrites titles. TagSpion shows what is in the HTML. That is your baseline.
Is a long description an error?
No, just a warning. Google truncates it in the result. The most important part belongs in the first 120 characters.