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Text-only browser to view as Googlebot

         

vordmeister

8:55 pm on Feb 25, 2020 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



I've been asked to look at a website of a very large organisation (it's only on a casual basis to maybe send a few tips to the marketing department).

Seems to me it has some big troubles. Most things kind of show up in search if you search very carefully but using a site: search the main website seems buried many pages in and a sub domain trumps it. It feels like the old days when they invented javascript and flash websites. HTML looks reasonably functional but there are a lot of country redirects going on and a lot of contact pages showing up high in the site search.

Back in the day I would have used the Lynx text browser to see what was going on, but my version doesn't support SSL. I would love a new version of Lynx which supports SSL that I could just install, but as always it looks like I'll need to compile it myself after figuring out how to compile stuff.

Can anyone recommend any other tools so I can see what Googlebot has to go through before it can see content? Not getting paid (much) for the work but I would like to make a good impression.

lammert

5:28 pm on Feb 26, 2020 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Some systems also have elinks installed which is a lynx alternative.

Dimitri

6:17 pm on Feb 26, 2020 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 5+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Can anyone recommend any other tools so I can see what Googlebot has to go through before it can see content?

In the GSC you can use the "URL Inspection" tool. This gives you information about the page, but the most interesting is that, if you choose "live test", it will show you what Googlebot read and how it rendered the page.

ps: googlebot runs javascript.

ps2: this is the tool which was previously called "Fetch as Googlebot" in the old GSC.

not2easy

10:07 pm on Feb 26, 2020 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



If you have developer tools such as Live Headers extension for FF, you can see every request and the server's response for any page. You should be able to see what googlebot 'sees'. It is not a text browser but ljust records all request/response actions made by the browser. I know that there are other such tools out there for other browsers.

vordmeister

6:48 pm on Feb 27, 2020 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Thanks for all the replies. It's been a busy week but I'll look into those as I miss tools that make life quick and easy. For over 10 years I haven't needed the tools as I've only been working on my own sites.

I spent some time looking at the website and while it is a bit horrid it does appear in search. If I search for words contained in the relevant page titles they tend to rank quite well. The problem seems to be the pages are marketing fluff and don't seem to mention anything about what they want to sell. I've suggested a get together to work out what the pages should be about.