Sim Spider and Google

[needhelp]

2 questions:

(1) since Google runs most of my life now :), I was wondering if results from Sim Spider (Webmasterworld SE tool) is a good indicator of what Google sees when it crawls?

(2) when I sim-spider my site, the keywords aren't showing up - everything else does. I can't figure out why - my html meta tags seem just fine. Does this mean Google won't see my keywords either?

I know I should be concerned with other SE's too, I am...but Google is always my first concern! THANKS!

[needhelp]

After doing some more research, which I should have done first (sorry), it seems simspider requires that meta tags are in the order of : description then keywords. Mine is switched. And, I hate to say it, the way my site is being built using a design company's user interface, I can't switch them around! UGH! :(

With all this said, anyone know if Google (and any other SE for that matter) cares about the order of keywords vs. description tags?

I hope not!

[Kandevil]

Surely once the site is designed, you can open up all the pages in a text editor and just swap them round.

I dont know if it matters, but its best to follow conventions isn't it, that way your sure.

[Dreamquick]

As far as I know there is no "right" order for those two meta tags to appear - as long as they appear somewhere inside the HEAD element then they are complying with HTML/XHTML specifications which is what the search engine spiders should be using as their base-line compatibility setup.

As a general rule if you can get the page to validate against the HTML spec (http://validator.w3.org/) then *nothing* should have problems crawling that page.

If your page validates and a spider *can't* read it then it's a major problem with *their* software - there isn't much more you can do as you have taken all the reasonable measures to make sure that as many people/programs can understand it.

You have to bear in mind that SimSpider is just a little utility which lets people understand how a very *basic* internet spider sees their website - just because SimSpider has certain issues it does not automatically mean that a real search engine spider will have those issues - real search engine spiders are orders of magnitude more advanced than SimSpider (no offence Brett).

Also as a side note you do realise that the majority of the big search engines don't actually use the keywords meta-tag anymore? If you want to find out more about this there are lots of discussions about this topic if you really want to go into depth over it...

p.s.

In answer to that first question - yes, it's a fairly good idea of what a spider sees.

I'd actually recommend getting hold of a text-only browser, such as Lynx, as this gives you a *really* good understanding of what's going on because (just like a spider) they need to turn HTML into simplified text-only content while at the same time preserving as much styling as possible to help the user browse the page (ie preserving formatting, making titles obvious etc).

For a spider the process is similar except that instead of helping a user to browse the page they are attempting to analyse that page to understand which are the most important bits of it.

- Tony

[needhelp]

Great info, thanks!