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Use Google Translate To See If Google Can Access Your Content

Google TranslateTypically, if you are unsure if Google is able to crawl and index your content – you can login to Google Webmaster Tools and use the fetch as GoogleBot tool.

But if you do not want to use that tool, you can simply use Google Translate and see if Google Translate can access your site.

The tip came up in a Google Webmaster Help thread where John Mueller from Google explained to one webmaster that the reason Google is not indexing his site is because when GoogleBot tries to crawl it, the server is redirecting the bot to Google.com.

He showed this happening by sending him a link to Google Translate which shows the Google home page loading.

Clearly this is a move by a server guy to block spiders from crawling the site.

Tony McCreath tipped me off to this thread and in a private discussion area John from Google added (I am pretty sure he won’t mind me sharing this despite it being in a private forum):

Many of you probably knew this already but just in case.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

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