Posts Tagged ‘Googlebot’

Fetch as Googlebot

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

One of the cool things that has been added to Google Webmaster Tools is the feature which allow you to see the website as Googlebot sees it. There are plugins which also you to do this in Firefox, namely, user agent switcher. This alters the user agent string when making a request to a website so that it will return the page as though it were being spidered by Googlebot.
The addition tof this Google Webmastertools adds this functionality. It is located inĀ  the labs section. Simply type a URL and press fetch. You can only fetch pages on sites which you have added to your webmaster tools account however.

When the request is processed, it will show the page code as Google sees it allowing you to identify if there are any problems. It is particularly good for identifying spam links that have been injected into your site which may only be visible to Googlebot.