How Google Views Your Site

Published on 18 Jun 2014 at 10:16 pm.
Filed under Google,Mobile,Search Engine Optimization.

Have you ever wondered how Google views your site? Google now lets you see how they index your pages.

The Fetch as Google feature in Google Webmaster Tools just got a major upgrade. In the past you use the Fetch as Google feature to force Google to crawl a page and return the exact raw HTML. This is very helpful after you have made a major change to your site. Changes like if you move to a new web hosting provider. While that is helpful, it doesn’t tell you anything about what Google actually does with the page. We knew that Google ran basic JavaScript. We didn’t know how far it took things.

The Fetch as Google feature is as smart as it is powerful. The Fetch as Google feature has a toggle that lets you specify the device type. This means that you can see how Google views your site on a desktop and a mobile device.

Help! Google Views My Site Differently!

Don’t be alarmed. It doesn’t need to. The first thing you need to ask yourself is if the differences actually matter. Does it matter what font Google uses to index your site? Not really. Nor does it matter if the social media sharing widget showed up. Google isn’t going to share your page to Facebook.

How Google views Brand Builder Websites.

So what do you do if things are really off? Check your site’s robots.txt file. This is a file that resides at the base of your website. It’s entire job is to tell search engines what files and directories they can use. It’s very likely that you’re telling search engines that they can index your JavaScript and CSS files.

It’s also possible that the platform that runs your creates another version of your site specifically for search engines. This is cloaking in the world of SEO. It’s a bad practice that some black-hat SEO companies use. It is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can get your site removed from Google’s index. Don’t do it. Treat Google just like you would treat a regular person and you will see positive results.

Thank you and keep building your brand.

This post was originally published as How Google Views Your Site for Brand Builder Websites.