What a search engine spider sees
Search engines discover pages with programs called crawlers or spiders. A crawler downloads a page's HTML, pulls out the text and links, and follows those links to find more pages. It doesn't see your colors, photos or layout the way a visitor does.
This simulator strips a page down to roughly what a crawler works with, so you can spot problems that are invisible when you look at the page in a browser.
What to look for
- Missing text. If your services, prices or city only appear in images or are loaded by scripts, the text view will be thin. Put the important words in real HTML text.
- A messy heading outline. Headings should read like a table of contents: one main H1, then H2s for each section.
- Dead ends. Pages with few internal links make it harder for crawlers (and visitors) to find the rest of your site. Link to your service and location pages.
- A noindex tag. If we flag a
noindexrobots tag, search engines are being told not to show the page at all. This often gets left on by accident after a site redesign.
What this tool doesn't do
It reads the HTML your server sends. Google can also run JavaScript and render the page, so a JavaScript-heavy site may get indexed better than this view suggests. It also doesn't check robots.txt rules or how often Google crawls you. For that, use Google Search Console.