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. Â Put that page, and have Googlebot fetch it. Â 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. Â 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. Â 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. Â Next to the green URL in the SERP listing for your homepage there is a green arrow. Â Click that and select 'cached'. Â 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. Â If the content is not there, there is a good chance they can't. Â 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
-
Is having my homepage on a subfolder harmful?
Hi guys, I am the webmaster of the following two websites: www.gpblog.com/nl
Technical SEO | | NielsDE
www.gpblog.com/en The first URL is the Dutch version of GPBlog, the second URL is the UK version of GPblog. Whenever a person visits www.gpblog.com he gets redirected to either the Dutch version or the UK version based on his location. My question is: is it harmful to have 1. your homepage on a subfolder and 2. is it harmful to run two different languages on one domain using this technique? Thank you in advance!1 -
Canonical homepage link uses trailing slash while default homepage uses no trailing slash, will this be an issue?
Hello, 1st off, let me explain my client in this case uses BigCommerce, and I don't have access to the backend like most other situations. So I have to rely on BG to handle certain issues. I'm curious if there is much of a difference using domain.com/ as the canonical url while BG currently is redirecting our domain to domain.com. I've been using domain.com/ consistently for the last 6 months, and since we switches stores on Friday, this issue has popped up and has me a bit worried that we'll loose somehow via link juice or overall indexing since this could confuse crawlers. Now some say that the domain url is fine using / or not, as per - https://moz.com/community/q/trailing-slash-and-rel-canonical But I also wanted to see what you all felt about this. What says you?
Technical SEO | | Deacyde0 -
Could I optimize my homepage anymore ?
Hi everyone, My website is http://brownquarterhorse.com I was wondering if it would be possible to optimize my homepage anymore. I just feel like it's lacking SEO. The page grader has rated it an 'A', but im not sure if the page grader is a good reflection ?
Technical SEO | | BenDuncombe0 -
Home page duplicate content...
Hello all! I've just downloaded my first Moz crawl CSV and I noticed that the home page appears twice - one with an appending forward slash at the end: http://www.example.com
Technical SEO | | LiamMcArthur
http://www.example.com/ For any of my product and category pages that encounter this problem - it's automatically resolved with a canonical tag. Should I create the same canonical tag for my home page? rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com" />0 -
Can someone evaluate this page so I can continue adding others?
Hi, I am adding a bunch of similar category stickers and I am not looking into that good SEO for these since there will be hundreds of them coming but I just want to include the relevant keywords that people perhaps use in the Google image search to take them to our site. They are all related to JDM (Japanese Domestic Motors) so I decided to include JDM at the end of all the SEO titles. I am writing totally different short descriptions for all of these stickers and the Related Products are changing as well. I just want to achieve something like Amazon or eBay listings do - not the perfect SEO since I cannot spend too much time with each sticker optimizing it but I don't want to NOINDEX, FOLLOW them either - hence the different related products for all items and also unique short descriptions. If you check one of the pages:Â http://www.redrockdecals.com/rising-sun-wakaba-leaf-sticker-red-black-jdm Do you think I should be in the safe side so I don't hurt my overall SEO? Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | speedbird12290 -
What about Panoramic content ?
Hello everyone ,, We have a website include a panoramic images for many pages this panorama is really unique and we did a hard work to collect it , we thought that will be very useful for our target audience !! We have tried to search about how to make a panoramic content working and support the SEO , Unfortunately NO result and NO information yet, _Could you help us in that filed _ _Thanks _
Technical SEO | | Visual-ex0 -
Duplicate Content Issue with
Hello fellow Moz'rs! I'll get straight to the point here - The issue, which is shown in the attached image, is that for every URL ending in /blog/category/name, it has a duplicate page of /blog/category/name/?p=contactus. Also, its worth nothing that the ?p=contact us are not in the SERPs but were crawled by SEOMoz and they are live and duplicate. We are using Pinnacle cart. Is there a way to just stop the crawlers from ?p=contactus or? Thank you all and happy rankings, James
Technical SEO | | JamesPiper0 -
Duplicate content connundrum
Hey Mozzers- I have a tricky situation with one of my clients. They're a reputable organization and have been mentioned in several major news articles. They want to create a Press page on their site with links to each article, but they want viewers to remain within the site and not be redirected to the press sites themselves. The other issue is some of the articles have been removed from the original press sites where they were first posted. I want to avoid duplicate content issues, but I don't see how to repost the articles within the client's site. I figure I have 3 options: 1. create PDFs (w/SEO-friendly URLs) with the articles embedded in them that open in a new window. 2. Post an image with screenshot of article on a unique URL w/brief content. 3. Copy and paste the article to a unique URL. If anyone has experience with this issue or any suggestions, I would greatly appreciate it. Jaime Brown
Technical SEO | | JamesBSEO0