Search Engine Spider View of Your Mambo Site

Whenever we work on SEO for Mambo sites, we need to consider how a search engine spider will view the site.

On today's web, much of the content that provides eye-candy on a web site is useless to search engines simply because they cannot "see" it. AJAX, JavaScript and Flash generated content, and any text contained in images, is generally content that cannot be read by search engine spiders. Content within iframes is also usually not spidered (the Mambo "wrapper" is an iframe).

Tools You Can Use to Check Your Site

Search Engine Spider Simulator for a quick check, or Sider/Crawler Simulator for Websites for a more detailed view.

These tools simulate a search engine and display the view a search engine may get of your content. They also show the links that a search engine is able to crawl on that content item.

It is questionable as to whether these do show what search engines see - search engine algorithms are a closely-guarded secret so the scripts on these sites cannot be relied upon for accuracy. However, they are useful tools for checking your site anyway.

Text View: use a text-based browser to view your site. Lynx may be downloaded free, or you could use the online Lynx tool for a quick check.

Search for your content in the Google cache. If its in the cache you know it can be viewed by googlebot.

Sign up for an account with Google Webmaster Tools. Using these free tools provided by Google you can monitor Google's indexing of your site and use its reports to verify that Google can access your content without any errors.