How do I use the Sim Spider tool

to see what spiders see?

[grnidone]

I feel so stupid asking this question.

How do I use that Sim Tool Brett has on his site? I don't understand the "referer" part.

-G

[Brett_Tabke]

You understand the concept of Refers? Everytime you connect to a site off a link, your browser sends that link to the next site right? follow that.

The referrer and agent part of Sim Spider just allows you to set that referrer and/or agent name that will be reported to the site you connect too.

You won't fool any cloakers into thinking you are a search engine spider by changing the agent name to a se spider. It is mainly a tool to strip the html and look at the 'naked' page with tags to see what a search engine will see.

The agent name is handy if a site is 'bigoted' and only allows certain (read: ie) browsers in the front door.

Referrer isn't all that important and probably should just be left blank.

[grnidone]

I understand the concept of "refers", but I wasn't understanding how it was going to help me see what search engines see.

Thanks for the help.
-Heather

[Brett_Tabke]

Ok, some pages require a 'referrer' from an on-site link to view a page. Other still, you just may want to, umm, fake out thinking you are coming from some other link.