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Tom
19th Feb 2004, 07:50 am
As discussed at yesterday's seminar, Google advises webmasters (http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html) that in order to view their site as a spider will see it, they should view their handiwork in a text browser. I had the same disappointing experience as Francis in trying to install Lynx. Fortunately there is an online version and you can just enter your URL. It is, to say the least, revealing. See Delorie (http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html).

On another point, Francis was right (and Tom wrong) about the frequency of full spidering by Google. Most people think it is much closer to once a month than once a week. I don't quite understand the relationship between Googlebot visits and full trawls. How charming that we are all beholden to the whims of spiders. Roll on The Age of Arachnophillia.

francis
19th Feb 2004, 08:06 pm
There used to be a service called lynx-me, which now appears to be called html2txt (http://cgi.w3.org/cgi-bin/html2txt), which has a much more basic UI. This is what cadtutor looks like in lynx-me (http://cgi.w3.org/cgi-bin/html2txt?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cadtutor.net).

As I mentioned yesterday, Opera (http://www.opera.com) offers an "emulate text browser" feature, which gives a similar result if you'd rather use a browser as opposed to a website and someone else's bandwidth.

David
19th Feb 2004, 08:30 pm
Hmm, that's interesting but *is* that how a spider would see your page? The text browser only displays content in the <body> of the page and we all know how important page <title> is to Google. Also there's no indication of <meta> tags either.

Obviously, it's possible to check if you have all the right keywords in the first paragraph (I don't because the text browser reads the left column first :( so I may have to rethink that).

Lot's to think about.