Fetch as Googlebot and Malware details—now in Webmaster Tools Labs!

Monday, October 12, 2009

The Webmaster Tools team is lucky to have passionate users who provide us with a great set of
feature ideas. Going forward, we’ll be launching some features under the “Labs” label so we can
quickly transition from concept to production, and hear your
feedback ASAP.
With Labs releases, you have the opportunity to play with features and have your feedback heard
much earlier in the development lifecycle. On the flip side, since these features are available
early in the release cycle they’re not as robust, and may break at times.

Today we’re launching two cool features:

• Malware details
• Fetch as Googlebot

Malware details (developed by Lucas Ballard)

Before today, you may have been relying on manual testing,
our safe browsing API,
and malware notifications
to determine which pages on your site may be distributing malware. Sometimes finding the malicious
code is extremely difficult, even when you do know which pages it was found on. Today we are happy
to announce that we’ll be providing snippets of code that exist on some of those pages that we
consider to be malicious. We hope this additional information enables you to eliminate the malware
on your site very quickly, and reduces the number of iterations many webmasters go through during
the review process.

More information on this cool feature is available at our
Online Security Blog.

Fetch as Googlebot (developed by Javier Tordable)

“What does Googlebot see when it accesses my page?” is a common question webmasters ask us on our
forums and at conferences. Our keywords and HTML suggestions features help you understand the
content we’re extracting from your site, and any issues we may be running into at crawl and
indexing time. However, we realized it was important to provide the ability for users to submit
pages on their site and get real-time feedback on what Googlebot sees. This feature will help
users a great deal when they re-implement their site with a new technology stack, find out that
some of their pages have been hacked, or want to understand why they’re not ranking for specific
keywords.

We’re pretty excited about this launch, and hope you are too. Let us know
what you think!

Posted by Sagar Kamdar, Product Manager, Webmaster Tools