Have you ever thought that when Googlebot crawls your website’s webpages, how does it look and how does Googlebot sees it?
And, most importantly, does Google Search also look the same way how Googlebot sees your website?
Well, we are going to discuss the answer to both of these questions in this article.
The Webpage Composition
A web page forms with a combination of different elements, for example, HTML (the most important one), Javascript, CSS, Images and other resources.
Each of these resources have their own importance in completing the formation of a webpage.
Now, when Googlebot or any other crawler crawls the web page, it downloads all these resources to have a complete picture of how it looks.
Google Search on the other hand is completely dependent on Googlebot.
It assigns Googlebot to gather the visualization (in addition to many other tasks) of a webpage.
Now, the way Googlebot sees your webpages, so does Google Search.
Ranking Consequences
Think of this way, Suppose you hide some characteristic of a product, let say how it looks.
Then in that scenario, are you going to purchase it, let say just by reading its description.
In most of the cases, obviously “NO”. It depends on product to product.
The same thing happens with a webpage as well. Suppose, in a webpage, there is some image which is valuable to the reader but for some reason it is not loading when Googlebot crawls the web page.
However, there is some other website which provides the same content and image with proper resource loading, then in that case Googlebot ranks their webpage higher in comparison to yours.
Hence, it is important that all the valuable resources of your webpage load properly when Googlebot crawls it.
Checking a Webpage View w.r.t Googlebot
Now to enhance your web page in the eyes of Googlebot, it is important to first check how it looks.
To do so, Google Search Console provides us a feature called “URL Inspection”
With URL Inspection, you can find out the answer to the question “How Does Googlebot see my site”. Just follow the steps below.
- Copy the webpage URL you want to test and enter in the search field.
- Once, the Googlebot live crawls the web page, click on the Live Test tab.
- Then, click on the View Tested Page to unlock the right sidebar.
- Then, finally click on Screenshot to see how your web pages look in the eyes of Googlebot.
So, from the above analysis, we have concluded that we should maintain the same transparency of resource loading both to the website visitors as well as to the search engines.
Insight: Reddit Thread
