“Malware Details & Fetch as Googlebot” added to Webmaster tools

“Malware Details & Fetch as Googlebot” added to Webmaster tools

Breaking news, Google announced 2 great new additions to the Google webmaster tools.

* Fetch as Googlebot – The ability now to see how any page on your domain appears to Googlebot

* Malware details – Another great source to check if you think your website has been penalized.

The tools are located under the new ‘Labs’ menu heading in your webmaster tools console.

After a quick play with the new tools, our conclusion is that Fetch as Googlebot will be something that will appeal to many SEO’s on a daily basis. Its a simple way to check for any robot.txt or HTACCESS redirect errors on a URL without having to dive into live HTTP headers, its also pretty handy to see how Googlebot interprets JS / PHP scripts on the website.

One important issue we noticed was  ‘fetch as Googlebot’ only returned 585 lines of code, whether this is a hard cut-off imposed on the tool or is an actual representation of how Googlebot is reading the page is been asked on the Webmaster central blog as you are reading this. If it is the later, than we will investigate this and dig a little further for our readers, as this would add another extra criteria in how we understand Googlebot.

Update: It has been reported the fetch as googlebot is limited to 100kb worth of code, we are still investigating to see if this reflects what Googlebot see as well.

Have fun playing with the 2 new tools and let us know your comments on them.