Ever wondered exactly what Google can and can’t see on your website? Well, we are actually referring to what ‘Googlebot’ can see. Googlebot is Google’s web crawler. Let’s take a closer look…
What Google Can’t See
- Videos – While great for human users, search engines really can’t see the content of your videos.
- Images – They really spruce up a site, but Google can’t see what is in your images either.
- Flash – Google can see some Flash, but it is best used very sparingly…
What Google Can See
- Text – Any text that you can highlight with your cursor is visible to Google.
- Links – Any text or image links can be seen. Text links are best for SEO, but if you must use images, take a look at the last item on this list.
- HTML – Any text markup on your site is also visible to the search engines. This can include page title tags, description tags, author and copyright tags, keywords and more.
- Content around videos and images – While Google can’t really make out the image or video content, but Googlebot can see what is in close proximity. Google uses the context of the content to determine what it is about.
- Image ALT attributes – The ALT tag is an optional attribute for the text markup of an image. In other words, ALT stands for ‘Alternate Description’ and is intended to show if an image could not be loaded. You want to be sure any images containing text have a matching ALT attribute, or any images without text are well described.
Still not sure what Google can see on your site? See your site through Googlebot’s eyes.