What does Google think your website looks like?

Search engine optimisation is fantastic when you know what you’re doing. But what does Google actually have in its memory of your website?

Knowing what Google has in its index is a really important part of checking your website and making sure it ranks well.

If the Google Bot, which is basically Google’s automated script that indexes the entire internet, is not picking up your quality content or your entire site, then you are missing out on ranking for your selected keywords.

Here is a tip that will show us immediately how Google is indexing your website.

The first thing we need to do is to go to google.com.au and type in the following: site:nameofyourdomain.com.au/urlofchoice.html

So for example you could type :

site:smartcompany.com.au

or

site://stagecdn.smartcompany.com.au/planning/

The “site:” command essentially tells Google to display all pages with the following URL in it. This is a very useful way to show all pages of a particular domain to us.

Next to the search engine listing of the listed page, click on the ‘cached’ link. This will pop up with Google’s version of your site with the date which this page was last indexed.

Note that the Google Bot could have visited your site at a more recent date than the one shown here but, generally, it doesn’t change the date unless the site itself has changed since its previous visit.

An important thing to ensure is that all of your important content is displaying accurately and completely in the indexed version, compared with your live version.

If certain text is not displaying, there could be a few reasons to consider – Javascript text, flash or images without alt text, for example. If you have any important content in the formats above, you should recreate them in a text form somewhere else on your site.

Finally, don’t forget to check the ‘text-only version’ of your site which can be found as a link on the top right of Google’s cache of your website. This will enable you to filter out all the other bits on your site like images and help make checking the content easier.

Wai Hong Fong is co-founder and chieftain at OZHut, a multi-niche online retailer that is passionate about truly serving people in the online space. In 2010, he was recognized as one of Australia’s Top 30 under 30 entrepreneurs by SmartCompany.

Wai Hong also blogs on his journey as an Entrepeneur, with specific interests in SEO, Online Retail and learning to build strong businesses that thrive and in turn help us grow healthy communities that cherish our families, lives and wellbeing.