Google Webmaster Central Blog - Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index

Fetch as Googlebot and Malware details -- now in Webmaster Tools Labs!

Monday, October 12, 2009 at 3:15 PM

The Webmaster Tools team is lucky to have passionate users who provide us with a great set of feature ideas. Going forward, we'll be launching some features under the "Labs" label so we can quickly transition from concept to production, and hear your feedback ASAP. With Labs releases, you have the opportunity to play with features and have your feedback heard much earlier in the development lifecycle. On the flip side, since these features are available early in the release cycle they're not as robust, and may break at times.

Today we're launching two cool features:
  • Malware details
  • Fetch as Googlebot
Malware details (developed by Lucas Ballard)

Before today, you may have been relying on manual testing, our safe browsing API, and malware notifications to determine which pages on your site may be distributing malware. Sometimes finding the malicious code is extremely difficult, even when you do know which pages it was found on. Today we are happy to announce that we'll be providing snippets of code that exist on some of those pages that we consider to be malicious. We hope this additional information enables you to eliminate the malware on your site very quickly, and reduces the number of iterations many webmasters go through during the review process.

More information on this cool feature is available at our Online Security Blog.


Fetch as Googlebot (developed by Javier Tordable)

"What does Googlebot see when it accesses my page?" is a common question webmasters ask us on our forums and at conferences. Our keywords and HTML suggestions features help you understand the content we're extracting from your site, and any issues we may be running into at crawl and indexing time. However, we realized it was important to provide the ability for users to submit pages on their site and get real-time feedback on what Googlebot sees. This feature will help users a great deal when they re-implement their site with a new technology stack, find out that some of their pages have been hacked, or want to understand why they're not ranking for specific keywords.


We're pretty excited about this launch, and hope you are too. Let us know what you think!

Posted by Sagar Kamdar, Product Manager, Webmaster Tools
The comments you read here belong only to the person who posted them. We do, however, reserve the right to remove off-topic comments.

53 comments:

Brian Ussery said...

GRRRRREAT work, I think that being able to fetch as Googlebot will be a big help to webmasters!

Costa Rica said...

It is a very nice feature to try, I did it and typed a wrong webpage and it got a wrong message. Now I couldn't erase it.
What it really does is that we get to see the code just as a search engine will, how ever it will be nice to know which are the most important sentences or paragraphs for Google from those try web pages, so we let them stay just as they are to qualify for some keywords.

Ellithy said...

yea, noticed it and expected a blog post
however for Arabic language written in encoding windows ISO-1986 is not readable by Google: gives invalid characters
however in search results it is written normally

Eric Dorsey said...
This post has been removed by the author.
Webmaster said...

Nice. I am anxious to see it in action.

Nariman Haghighi said...

This looks to be just the HTTP response. Is there any way we can see the delineation of parsed keywords/text that were derived from the response, along the lines of tool like submitexpress.com/analyzer/?

adir1 said...

Looks good! It didn't find any malware on my sites, which is as it should be!

Marhendra Putra said...

i still do not understand abaot what "Fetch as Googlebot" is, how, what's exactly happened wit my website if i click fetch button.
thank's for your attention

Lil said...

Hi, John from Li'l engine.

Is there a cut off of 585 lines of code returned from the new "fetch as Googlebot" feature?

Or is this actually telling us that Googlebot can see pass 585 lines of code!?

Rgds

andy said...

simply superb tools... i remeber the malware thing from a link i recieved a while back which ran google diagnostics on your site to check for malware... pretty damn cool stuff

also can't wait to play with fetchbot

Utsav said...
This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
dzinepankaj said...

very informative post.

OctacularMusteline said...

RE Lil (October 12, 2009 9:02 PM)

I just checked with 1500 lines of code and 1000 lines of content-heavy code, and both were "fetched" fine. First successful diagnostic from the 'fetch' feature?

Fredrick J Sahaya said...

One more new few feature from Google.

Myke Black said...

Ok, so no one has spotted the potential problem here?
Surely this tool will help black hats and spammers out there to create cloaked pages, or to spoof a falsly high PR by using a 301 redirect on detection of the google bot to a high PR site? or is it just me being paranoid?
I know there are several different googlebot signatures that are designed to detect cloaking, but having this tool to debug your black-hatting (if such a verb exists) will only help to create more spam and trickery in the SERPs.

Maybe we should help them some more, eg have a google mass mailing facility, or how about a hand clickfraud generator?

Leon Linde said...

"Fetch as" shows exactly/around 100 000 bytes [100KB].

The question is: does it fetch more than it is shown?

DataPlus - Custom Data Services said...

Wonderful, just yesterday I was trying different options to see how my site looked to googlebot. Like this one. Great troubleshooting tool.

OMG said...

It appears on my webmaster tool and U google it right away bring me here.

Thanks for the info.

Jamie said...

I like Fetch as Googlebot. I used to search to know how Google see my site, but I didn't believe what other websites displayed. Now I know I can trust this because it is officially from Google.

OMG said...

How to remove URL from "Fetch as Google"?

yonitg said...

That's a nice feature and I tried it right out,
but I don't see the difference between the output from it and a regular http fetch - is it just to make sure the google bot can see all the text on my page?
I hoped I would get more details regarding what the google bot sees, and not just the website's source code.

Divya Sai said...

Hey that's cool.....labs in GWT !!!

But have you removed the page with highest page rank from crawl stats? or is it a problem only in my account?

wazz said...


Great new feature to webmasters tool

www.dakotaboo.com said...

Nice feature (I think) but what does fetch show me apart from a truncated view of my source code, with which I'm already very familiar? Presumably it would be of use if my HTML was generated rather than hand crafted? Or am I missing something here? Happy to be enlightened.

John said...

Does anyone have an answer regarding the cut-off of 585 lines, or the 100kb cut-off as per Leon_linde ?

Googlers, Matt Cutts? Please? :)

Susan Moskwa said...

@John / Lil: What's the URL for which you're seeing this cut-off?

david said...

I noticed this update when I logged in last night and viewed our top 10 pages as Googlebot.

It's also reassuring that we're not reporting any malware errors.

Thanks for these developments.

Brian M said...

WoW, Great tools! Keep up the great work!

cambull said...

I'm still hunting for a link to Fetch. George.Campbell@gmx.fr

Manniac said...

I'm sorry, but I don't get it. The html-code that googlebot fetches looks exactly the same as in my browser. Is it supposed to be different?
Or what is the benefit of the new fetch as googlebot feature?

I'm just trying to understand...

SEO said...

God bless google. I was about to spend $50 to purchase a licensed version of Malware remover. Keep it up.

Web Design Firm

Lil said...

@Susan Moskwa - We're looking at our domains homepage http://www.lilengine.com

As you can see the page has 'a lot' of content, which is over 100kb.

If googlebot is not crawling greater than 100kb than we would be much better off not having all that content on the homepage.

Has anyone found anything useful on the SEO blogs relating to this?

qwertyweb said...

amazing , this will make sites more secure !
i was trying out other demos of softwares , bless g bot ! :D
http://www.qwertyweb.blogspot.com

Leon Linde said...

@John,

As with 100KB-issue, there's an answer in GWM forum:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?fid=09d32bc88ed7a866000475d3ce7c98d9&hl=en

mike said...

Absolutely fantastic.
I have ripped my hair out in the past hunting for possible malicious code... Written to Google several times begging for a human response... This is brilliant. Thanks Guys.

Shafiq said...

Great Tasks done.... I think these will help webmasters a lot...

Bill Scully said...

This is great, just today I was trying different tools to see how my site looked to google. This should help webmasters with unexplained indexing issues.

Blink Interactive said...

it's nice to see the response HTTP headers.

known said...

I believe you can set User Agent Sting to http://www.useragentstring.com/pages/Googlebot/

in about;config in Firefox

Shekhar Sahu said...

Great

kittu said...

great features!!

ClickZs said...

This is really a great help by Google developer for the rest of the web masters.

Keep it up with the good work!

drhowarddrfine said...

How do you get into it? The instructions say to login to webmaster tools, select your site, then go to labs->fetch as googlebot, but there is no such selection from webmaster tools.

Xris (Flatbush Gardener) said...

How do I "Fetch as Googlebot"? It doesn't show up under Webmaster Tools.

Osagie Irowa said...

This is surely another great SEO tool for us webmasters to keep up with our content creation techniques. Thanks, Gabriel Osagie Irowa

Bhauvik Tripathi said...

I think this is a wonderful feature in Google webmaster tool. one of my site got malware code and it helps me lot. Thanks !!

WebHel said...

Do you warn the webmaster, or give the webmaster the option to get warned, when there is malware detected?

Pune said...

Good work! very informative post

Ubalin WebBlog said...

I've tried this feature, but my page lose from google index after that, could anybody help me to solve this problem. thanks

www.seoservicesindia.co.uk said...

how can i use this new feature (Fetch as Googlebot) because i can't understand hows it's working ?

some body can explain me

SEO Expert said...

hey it's really nice one.. Now we can sure get result soon..

but, i have one questions, if we can add by mistake some other things and we need to remove than what we have to do.. there is no options for delete.. ????

Eager for Reply..

Thanks n' Regards

Nick said...

Fetch as Googlebot helped get a site out of the banned and back into the index.

Nice addition to WMT.

Solomon said...

This is a great Feature!! Thanks for that