Is there a tool that will allow me to see what a webpage looks like from the “eyes” of a search engine?
Michael Cyger
[ Admin ]
Search engines use “bots” or automated robots to visit websites, not humans. These bots index text (read and store for analysis) and follow links. That’s it. Flash, Javascript and images are not visible to bots.
Now, when they’re indexing the text there are a few additional things they look for:
- Keywords and phrases
- Meta tags (meta description, meta keywords)
- Title tag (<title>)
- Links
- Header tags (<h1>, <h2> and <h3>)
- Bold text
You can also try using a web browser like Lynx to “examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.”
NN comments
Simon Probert
-
I agree with Lynx – that is an excellent way to view web pages – what I am interested in though is theat you mention the bots “see” tags like h1,h2 etc… do they also see classes? so for example “h1 class=something” if so, is it worth naming your CSS styles in a way that uses keywords? Actually that’s probably another question in it’s own right… see http://www.page2sucks.com/questions/do-robots-see-classes-in-styles
Great question. I’d like to see this too!