The Google Webmaster Central Blog announced the launch of a new “Labs” section in Google Webmaster Tools. Labs is for Google to launch features that might not be fully tested and have bugs, but at the same time give webmasters these features sooner to test and play with. The first two labs releases were “Fetch as Googlebot” and “Malware Details.” I’ll show you both below:
Fetch as Googlebot allows you to see what Googlebot, Google’s spider, sees for a specific page on your domain. Here is a picture of the tool:
You type in the page name or leave it blank for the home page and hit “Fetch.” After a few seconds, you can refresh the page and see the word “success” (hopefully). Click on “Success” to see the output of what Googlebot sees. Here is a snippet of what Googlebot sees for this site’s home page:
A Google Webmaster Help thread reports a bug with this tool. To reproduce it, 1. Run a test then 2. View result then 3. Use the Site Picker to change site then 4. Fetch As Googlebot tries to display the path fetched in (1) on domain picked in (3) and gives “The details of this request are not available.”
Another Google Webmaster Help thread has some feedback for Google on the Fetch tool. Here are some of those suggestions:
– Highlight ignored page elements
– Highlight issue elements found on page. e.g.
– Poor mark-up
– invalid doctype
– Invalid links
– not followed links
– Un-indexed page areas
– Page Improvement recommendations
– Heat map of content indexing so that a webmaster can see areas of the content which are going to have higher index priority than others.
On the ” Malware Details” feature, the Google Online Security blog has more details and pictures. Thankfully, I do not have a malware issue on my site, so I don’t have anything to take screen shots of, but here are screen shots from the blog:
These are all useful features and I am sure the majority of webmasters are happy to get labs features with bugs, in exchange for getting earlier releases of Webmaster Tools features.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help, DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.
