11/09
2009
Search Engine Simulator (8,243 views)
Frames, Flash, JavaScript-generated navigation structures, most images — these and more are all being ignored by search engines.
That’s why we created this little tool to help you visualize and demonstrate how your site looks to crawlers, robots and other spider-based search engines. All they are interested in is text. If your content is embedded in an image or a flash animation, chances are most search engines are ignoring it.
Try the Search Engine Simulator with your URL!
Yes, we know, a while ago Google announced their robot is now able to crawl flash (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html).
Before all you flash developers get overly excited, let’s clarity something:
Google cannot index the content of you little flash movie. There is no way to do that. What they say is this:
…”We’ve improved our ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds.”…
It means they (partially) index parts that contain text, if there are any. The little sphere that’s hovering from left to right in front of the psychedelic-colored background will not get indexed. Sorry.
We also agree that you can do really nice things with JavaScript, but if the only way to access other pages is via a JavaScript-based drop-down or fly-out menu, chances are Google will only index this one page. Sorry again. Provide an alternate navigation – for your visitors as well as the search engines.
We created the tool with all the information available on how Google indexes pages.
It reads (sorted by importance):
– the page title
– the META tags
– the actual content (text)
– links and the link description (text and images)
– images (and the existence of the “alt” tag)
– header (H1 – H6) tags
You can email the results to yourself (or someone else), the report will be attached to the email and saved on our server (so you can send someone the link to the report).
Try the Search Engine Simulator with your URL!
Posted in: tech mix
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