Today our friends at Google(tm) released Fetch as Googlebot. This is a new tool available in your webmaster control panel (http://www.google.co.uk/webmasters/) under the Labs link in the Dashboard links.
It's purpose is to display what Google sees when it visits your web pages. The reason this tool is going to be useful to webmasters is that it will enable them to ensure that what Google received is what you intend them to see. This is not a tool to allow you to change the content you send to Google, that would be a real no, no and is a sure fire way to get your website blacklisted. However, it is intended to allow you to check all of the;
- HTTP headers
- Cookies
- Content types
- And overall web page content
At the moment the results are very raw and displays a basic dump of your web pages headers and HTML markup. We feel there is more to come though, we are going to add some comments to Google Labs feedback to include;
- Highlight ignored page elements
- Highlight issue elements found on page. e.g.
- Poor markup
- invalid doctype
- invalid links
- not followed links
- un-indexed page areas
- Page Improvement recommendations
- Heat map of indexable content so that a webmaster can see areas of the content which are going to have higher index priority than others.
Why not let us know your thoughts and together we can make the Fetch as Googlebot a tool for everyone to benefit from.