Can Googlebot read the content on our homepage?
-
Just for fun I ran our homepage through this tool:
http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/search-engine-simulator.shtml
This spider seems to detect little to no content on our homepage. Interior pages seem to be just fine. I think this tool is pretty old. Does anyone here have a take on whether or not it is reliable? Should I just ignore the fact that it can't seem to spider our home page?
Thanks!
-
Thanks all! Yes, I was familiar with the "Text-only" version and the Fetch as Googlebot, so I wasn't overly concerned. It just seemed odd that this particular spider couldn't get to the content. I think it is a very unsophisticated spider!
-
Assuming you've verified your site in Google Webmaster Tools, you can go in there and to go Crawl > Fetch as Googlebot. Put that page, and have Googlebot fetch it. Once it's done, you can click on the "Success" link, and this will show you exactly what Googlebot fetched with regards to that page. Make sure the source code you're seeing here is what you expect.
-
Hi Dana,
We would normally check through something like Website Auditor... I've run the tool on our home page and it seems to be missing some parts of our content, not sure why. Never had an issue before though with other tools, so would put it down to this tool....
Hope that helps.
-
Take a look at the text-only cached version of the page. If you are unsure how to do that follow my crude instructions below.
What I do to test if Googlebot can view the content of my homepage:
Do a Google search for 'site:example.com' and find your homepage. Next to the green URL in the SERP listing for your homepage there is a green arrow. Click that and select 'cached'. Then, when viewing the cached version of the homepage, click 'Text-only version' in the bottom right corner of the grey bar that appears at the top of the browser.
If the content you are questioning shows up, there is a good chance Google has obviously been able to crawl and index it. If the content is not there, there is a good chance they can't. If the content is in a hidden div it will likely still not show up in the text-only cache.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can google bots read my internal post links if they are all listed in a javascript accordian where I list my sources?
I post a JavaScript accordion drop down tab [ a collapsible content area ] at the end of all my posts. I labeled the accordion "Show Article Sources"., and when a user clicks it, then the accordion expands open and it shows all the sources I listed for my article. And this is where I post all of my articles links that I reference per each article. But I read somewhere that google crawlers can not read text in a drop down JavaScript tab. So I am wondering now if this is true because that would mean I have no internal linking SEO going on since it cant read the links? ..... if it is true, then I should remove the accordion from all my articles and some how include the links I reference in the actual body text so I can get SEO benefits from external linking similar content? If that's true, what is an aesthetic way to do this, any example links? Tips ? Thoughts ?
Technical SEO | | ianizaguirre0 -
Tricky Duplicate Content Issue
Hi MOZ community, I'm hoping you guys can help me with this. Recently our site switched our landing pages to include a 180 item and 60 item version of each category page. They are creating duplicate content problems with the two examples below showing up as the two duplicates of the original page. http://www.uncommongoods.com/fun/wine-dine/beer-gifts?view=all&n=180&p=1 http://www.uncommongoods.com/fun/wine-dine/beer-gifts?view=all&n=60&p=1 The original page is http://www.uncommongoods.com/fun/wine-dine/beer-gifts I was just going to do a rel=canonical for these two 180 item and 60 item pages to the original landing page but then I remembered that some of these landing pages have page 1, page 2, page 3 ect. I told our tech department to use rel=next and rel=prev for those pages. Is there anything else I need to be aware of when I apply the canonical tag for the two duplicate versions if they also have page 2 and page 3 with rel=next and rel=prev? Thanks
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Z-indexed content
I have some content on a page that I am not using any type of css hiding techniques, but I am using an image with a higher z-index in order to prevent the text from being seen until a user clicks a link to have the content scroll down. Are there any negative repercussions for doing this in regards to SEO?
Technical SEO | | cokergroup0 -
301 redirect homepage question
Hi If i have a homepage which is available at both www.homepage.com and www.homepage.com// should i 301 the // version to the first version. Im curious as to whether slashes are taking into consideration Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | TheZenAgency0 -
Auto genrated content problem?
Hi all, I operate a Dutch website (sneeuwsporter.nl), the website is a a database of European ski resorts and accommodations (hotels, chalets etc). We launched about a month ago with a database of about 1700+ accommodations. Of every accommodation we collected general information like what village it is in, how far it is from the city centre and how many stars it has. This information is shown in a list on the right of each page (e.g. http://www.sneeuwsporter.nl/oostenrijk/zillertal-3000/mayrhofen/appartementen-meckyheim/). In addition a text of this accomodation is auto generated based on some of the properties that are also in the list (like distance, stars etc). Below the paragraph about the accommodation is a paragraph about the village the accommodation is located in, this is a general text that is the same with all the accommodations in this village. Below that is a general text about the resort area, this text is also identical on all the accommodation pages in the area. So a lot of these texts about the village and area are used many times on different pages. Things went well at first and every day we got more Google traffic, and more and more pages. But a few days ago our organic traffic took a near 100% dive, we are hardly listed anymore and if we are at very low places. We expect the Google gave us a penalty. We expect this to be the case because of 2 reasons: we have auto generated text that only vary slightly per page we re-use the content about villages and area's on many pages We quickly removed the content of the villages and resort area's because we are pretty sure that this is definitely something Google does not want. We are less sure about the auto generated content, is this something we should remove as well? These are normal readable text, they just happen to be structured more or less the same way on every page. Finally, when we made these and maybe some other fixes, what is the best and quickest ways to let Google see us again and show them we improved? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | sneeuwsporter0 -
Https Version of Homepage in SERPS
The https version of our homepage appears in Google's SERPs. We have rel canonical on the page pointing to the http version. We have a redirect in our htaccess that sends https to http. I thought this was just a fluke and it would be fixed by the next crawl, but it's been like this for a few weeks now. Not only that, but we're losing rank a bit and I'm afraid there's a correlation. Has this ever happened to anyone?
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept0 -
Blocking AJAX Content from being crawled
Our website has some pages with content shared from a third party provider and we use AJAX as our implementation. We dont want Google to crawl the third party's content but we do want them to crawl and index the rest of the web page. However, In light of Google's recent announcement about more effectively indexing google, I have some concern that we are at risk for that content to be indexed. I have thought about x-robots but have concern about implementing it on the pages because of a potential risk in Google not indexing the whole page. These pages get significant traffic for the website, and I cant risk. Thanks, Phil
Technical SEO | | AU-SEO0 -
Copying Content With Permission
Hi, we received an email about a guy who wants to copy and paste our content on his website, he says he will keep all the links we put there and give us full credit for it, so besides keeping all the links on the page, which is the best way for him to give us the credit? a link to the original article? an special meta tag? what? Thank you PS.Our site its much more authorative than his and we get indexed within 10min from the moment we publish a page, so I don't worry about him out raking us with our own content.
Technical SEO | | andresgmontero0