Robert Burns was right when he said, “O would some power the gift to give us to see ourselves as others see us.” He probably wasn’t thinking about search engine robots when he wrote it, but it certainly applies. If you don’t know how the major search engine robots (like Googlebot) “see” your website, then you may be in the dark when you’re trying to make changes to bring up your standings in the search engine results.
Fortunately, Google Webmaster Tools has a “Fetch as Googlebot” tool. On the Webmaster Tools dashboard, click on the “+” sign by the “Labs” link in the left hand column. When you do, you’ll see an option called “Fetch as Googlebot” as you can see in the first screen shot. Click on it, and it will download your site as the Googlebot sees it. (The tool is still buggy when it comes to interpreting PDF files, however.)
The second screen shot shows just a small part of what it sees. Even if you don’t know much about html, if you read through your results you can at least see if important parts of your site are making it into Googlebot’s “view” of your site. The main problems the Googlebot has is with Flash graphics, but there are workarounds for this.
