Google Labs For Webmaster Tools Launches: Fetch as Googlebot & Malware Details

Oct 13, 2009 - 8:45 am 7 by

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:

Google Webmaster Tools Labs: Fetch as Googlebot

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:

Google Webmaster Tools Labs: Fetch as Googlebot

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 Tools Labs: Malware Details

Google Webmaster Tools Labs: Malware Details

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.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

 
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: July 1, 2025

Jul 1, 2025 - 10:00 am
Google Updates

Google June 2025 Core Update Is Rolling Out - What We're Seeing So Far

Jul 1, 2025 - 7:51 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

New Google Search Console Insights Report

Jul 1, 2025 - 7:41 am
Spiders

Cloudflare To Block AI Crawlers By Default & Pay Per Crawl Model

Jul 1, 2025 - 7:31 am
Bing Search

Who Ate The Bing Search Results

Jul 1, 2025 - 7:21 am
Google AdSense

Google AdSense New Privacy Law & Opt-Out Mechanism

Jul 1, 2025 - 7:11 am
Previous Story: Google Maps Drops Tele Atlas For Google Data in US