What is Googlebot Fetch and Render:Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools has a great feature, Fetch As Google which allows webmasters to see the results of Googlebot trying to fetch their webpages. This tool returns useful information such as server headers and other HTML, which can help diagnose technical problems. It's was a great tool - but now Google has made it even greater! You can now see how Googlebot renders the webpage as well, rather than just fetching it.

Previously, you could use the Fetch as Googlebot feature to view an output of code and HTML. This served programmers well, but wasn't very helpful to those who're new to web programming, or those who are fairly new. Now, however, they can see a visual representation of what Googlebot sees.

In addition, it will also show you errors on what resources Googlebot could not access, effectively preventing it from fetching and rendering them on the page. Here is the new “fetch and render” button on the Fetch as Google feature:

Page Rendering

In order to render the page, Googlebot first tries to find all the external style or script files associated with a webpage. They are fetched if they are found, or not blocked by robots.txt. Such files include, but are not limited to, CSS, JavaScript, or image files. These are then used to render a preview image that shows Googlebot's view of the page.

After you have a page to Fetch and Render, it will take a few minutes and show you a status complete indicator. The indicator may show “partial” rendering, if resources are being blocked from Googlebot’s crawl. Either way, clicking on it will show you the rendering results.

Blocked Resources

External files that can easily found and accessed are used as-is. But what about those that might be blocked, such as by external servers or by your own robots.txt? For such cases, Googlebot follows the robots.txt directives for all such files, and shows the errors in accessing these files below the preview image of the rendered page.

For the sake of a more complete crawl, it is recommended that you make all such embedded resources accessible to Googlebot, provided that the resource adds some meaning. Resources such as website-analytics scripts, or social media buttons don't contribute meaningfully, and hence can be omitted.

Google recently announced more JavaScript debugging tools coming to Google Webmaster Tools, this is that tool, Google was talking about. It now clearly shows what resources are being blocked, such as JavaScript, CSS and so forth.