The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
Introduction to Googlebot spoofing
In this article, I'll describe how and why to use Google Chrome (or Chrome Canary) to view a website as Googlebot.
We'll set up a web browser specifically for Googlebot browsing. Using a user-agent browser extension is often close enough for SEO audits, but extra steps are needed to get as close as possible to emulating Googlebot.
Skip to "How to set up your Googlebot browser"[1].
Why should I view a website as Googlebot?
For many years, us technical SEOs had it easy when auditing websites, with HTML and CSS being web design’s cornerstone languages. JavaScript was generally used for embellishments (such as small animations on a webpage).
Increasingly, though, whole websites are being built with JavaScript.
Originally, web servers sent complete websites (fully rendered HTML) to web browsers. These days, many websites are rendered client-side (in the web browser itself) – whether that's Chrome, Safari, or whatever browser a search bot uses – meaning the user's browser and device must do the work to render a webpage.
SEO-wise, some search bots don’t render JavaScript, so won’t see webpages built using it. Especially when compared to HTML and CSS, JavaScript is very expensive to render. It uses much more of a device’s processing power — wasting the device’s battery life— and much more of Google’s, Bing’s, or any search engine’s server resource.
Even Googlebot has difficulties rendering JavaScript and delays rendering of JavaScript[2] beyond its initial URL discovery – sometimes for days or weeks, depending on the website. When I see "Discovered - currently not indexed" for several URLs in Google Search Console’s Coverage (or