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13 January 2010

Fetch as Googlebot

By Keir Whitaker

Editors note: Learn more about measuring the success of your site at Future of Web Apps Miami – February 22nd – 24th 2010. Buy your ticket now.

Ryan pointed out a nice little feature of Google Webmaster Tools recently and I thought it worth sharing.

Hidden away under the labs tab is a feature called “Fetch as Googlebot”. With “Fetch as Googlebot” you are able to see exactly how a page appears to Google when it’s crawled. Here’s the results for carsonified.com/blog. Click the image below to see it full size.

Why is this useful?

  • It allows you to troubleshoot a page’s poor performance in search results. For example it will identify content that can’t be crawled by Google.
  • It can help identify if your site has been hacked with malicious and undesired content
  • It identifies he HTTP response returned by your server
  • It highlights the HTML code as seen by Google. Useful if you use a lot of generated content in the page.

Other useful tools

As well as “Fetch as Googlebot” Webmaster Tools has a number of useful options including:

  • Sitemap submission
  • Facility to edit your sitelinks (links that appear beneath the pages search result in Google)
  • Help with reindexing your site if you move it to a new domain
  • Top search queries, keywords and subscriber stats
  • Help with robots.txt files
  • Crawler stats

You can find more out about Webmaster Tools on the Google web site.

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Future of Web Design London May 17-19 2010

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