To see our sites as Google sees ’em
In some contexts, it can be very useful to be able to view your site the way that the Googlebot web crawler views it.
Luckily, Google provides a tool that lets you do this: Fetch as Googlebot. You can see both the main web crawler's view and the mobile web crawler's view.
(With so much online stuff going mobile these days, we need a good opposite for “mobile.” Maybe “stationary”?) (That was a joke.)
The abovelinked Google help page also provides links to other Google tools, such as one that lets you test your robots.txt file, and one that lets you see which pages on your site Google had trouble crawling.
. . . In case you don't recognize the title of this entry, it's from the 1787 Robert Burns poem “To a Trackpad”:
O Pow'r to whom we look like fleasum,
See how we beg on hands and kneesum
To see our sites as Google sees 'em!
(That's one of Burns's lesser-known poems. He started out with “To a Mouse,” of course, and proceeded on to “To a Louse”; but after the critical drubbing the next several poems in the series received (“To a House,” “To a Grouse,” “To a Spouse,” and the never-published “To a Scouse”), he decided to switch to other input devices. Sadly, he died before he could complete “To a Keyboard.”)
