Can Googlebot read the content on our homepage?

[danatanseo]

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!

[danatanseo]

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!

[john4math]

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.

[piperis]

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.

[Schwaab]

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.