Could someone explain the "Fetch as Googlebot" in WMT?

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   sagebrush_mamaposted 13 years ago

   Thanks!

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   wampyriiposted 13 years ago

   Umm, I'll give it a go.
   
   Fetch as Googlebot means you are telling WMT to send Googlebot to a page, process it and then display it exactly as Googlebot sees it. Googlebot is their indexing spider, if it doesn't visit your site and can't read your page properly then you are not going to turn up in the search results.
   
   (note: You do NOT have to explicitly tell Googlebot to come visit using this tool as they're constantly crawling the web and Hubpages in particular gets a lot of love from their bots. I think its better to let them find your rather than to go out of your way to tell them where you are.)
   
   Anyway, we see a pretty page as rendered by whatever web browser we are using, Googlebot sees all the ugly html and scripting behind the scenes instead. It doesn't care about pretty formating, it just wants the cold, hard data. You can also do a view->source from your browser menu (if using IE) to see much of the same for any webpage.
   
   If you submit a page, wait a bit and then click on the "success" link you can scroll down and see your page exactly how Googlebot sees it. It looks pretty messy but that's what spiders see. If you are having problems with your site being crawled badly you can take a look at this yourself and see if Googlebot is even managing to download all the page contents and if not, you can see where it chokes. It can be a useful diagnostic tool if you are having indexing issues.
   
   You also get the option here to submit the page and the pages it links to, or just the page itself, to the Google index. I'm not sure that's necessary at Hubpages because G. seems to find these pages pretty quickly but if you are trying to fix a page which was indexed badly (sometimes a scripting error causes a mess, or a hacked page gets defaced etc. which G. then indexes) then this is a way to get that page re-indexed sooner rather than later.
   
   You only get a limited amount of fetches so I wouldn't use it unless you really need it.
   
   Hope that helps, although I probably made it more confusing.

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      sagebrush_mamaposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      Thanks...I was just wondering what the ramifications might be for some of us who have "plunged traffic"...wondering if using the fetch option, and then submitting for indexing would do any good. 
      
      Guess I'm a little in over my head with the techie stuff, but then, I knew that when I tried a Pascal class in the early 80's! 

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         wildernessposted 13 years agoin reply to this

         You might try going to your analytics, and clicking "my account".  I'm not sure now, but think that's how I signed up.

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