Tag: labs

Google Webmaster tools has introduced new labs feature – Labs is a testing ground for experimental features that aren’t quite ready for primetime. They may change, break or disappear at any time.

With the introduction of labs in Google webmaster tools, they have brought up 2 useful things:
1. Fetch as Googlebot
2. Malware details

Fetch as Googlebot:
The Fetch As Googlebot tool lets you see a page as Googlebot sees it. This is particularly interesting tool. We can analyze poor performance in search engines and we can take certain steps to improve.
The cause for the poor performance may be that, your visitors may be seeing something and Googlebot something else. If you use rich media, by using Fetch As Googlebot, you can see how Googlebot see the same page – whether they are able to crawl it or not.
While using Fetch as Googlebot, you can simply click on the Fetch button to see homepage being fetched. Or enter the URL of the article(without homepage URL). Note that, you need to enter a /(slash) at the end of URL orelse the fetching will not complete successfully[Google should think of fixing this].
After few seconds of submitting the URL, refresh the page and click on Success link, to see the fetched codes.

Ex: Some months back we had a problem with our blog.
i.e.,
1. Search results started showing only the Title of the blog, instead of article title/heading.
2. Pingback also started Displaying Blog Title and not Headline of Post.

We had hard time figuring out what was the cause for all the duplicate title errors in our Webmaster tools.
Finally with the help of a tool called spider-test, we rectified and fixed the problem.
You can read the full story here – Problem with Pingback and Title tag – Its Solution.

Spider test is a tool similar to Fetch as Googlebot. Spider test is a search engine indexing simulator tool which shows the source code of a page, all outbound links on the page, and common words and phrases found in the page copy.
Fetch as Googlebot is still in labs and we hope it will graduate with more power and usefulness.

Malware details:
This gives the details of the problem related to malware, which are affecting your web site. It gives the individual URLS and details such as the scripts/code that may be affecting the web site etc.
Now you know, where to look when you think that some malicious code has been injected into your website.

Use these tools and test your website, if you feel they are under performing in search engines, you may get to know what the culprit is.

You can access these tools:
1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
2. On the Dashboard, under Labs, click Fetch as Googlebot or Malware details.
3. In the text box, type the path to the page you want to check(with a / at the end), and click Fetch.
Malware details will be listed automatically, if found any.