Search Engine Optimization Blog � SEM News & Opinion

I have spoken about Impersonating Googlebot user agent using Firefox in the past and people have asked me how to do this using Firefox so I thought I would give a little tutorial on how to see what googlebot sees. I will start off with why somebody might want to impersonate Googlebot and the pros and cons of impersonating it.
Googlebot is the spider that crawls the internet looking for web pages. Whatever the Googlebot sees is what Google uses to decide how a page will rank in the search engine. Knowing this some people have decided to design a web page exactly how they think Google wants it to look like so it will rank better. Often times this can be a very ugly page so they design another page that looks how they want it to look. They then cloak their page so that the Googlebot user agent sees the page written for it and everybody else sees the page written for humans. This is against the Google rules.

When you surf the net your Internet browser sends out messages telling the website things about itself. Websites keep track of visitors in their log files. One of the bits of information that is sent out is something called a “User Agent”. Each browser has its own user agent string. You can find the user agent that you are sending by clicking here.

So if you want to surf around impersonate googlebot all you have to do is change your user agent. The way that I do it is to use Mozilla Firefox with the User Agent Switcher extension. Both sites have a download or install button just follow the directions it is quite straight forward. One the user agent switcher is installed you go to Tools -> User Agent -> switcher -> options -> options. Then click on “User Agents” and then click on “add”. Put “Googlebot” in the Description. Put

“Googlebot/2.1+(+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)”
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

in the User Agent.

firefox google bot
firefox googlebot