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Fetch a page as Googlebot and compare with a normal request

harmlessSEO checksdebian, ubuntu
Adjust the values, the command updates live
user@server
for ua in 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64)' 'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)'; do curl -s -o /dev/null -A "$ua" -w "%{http_code}  %{size_download} Bytes  $ua\n" https://example.com/; done

Compares two requests that differ only in the user agent. A different status code or a very different size points to bot blocking (WAF, Fail2ban, security plugins), hacked sites serving spam only to Google, or faulty caching rules.

Note: Small size differences due to nonces or timestamps are normal. diff <(curl -s URL) <(curl -s -A 'Googlebot' URL) compares the content in detail.

Also searched as

  • fetch page as googlebot curl
  • does google see a different page
  • check for cloaking
  • is googlebot being blocked

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Check for soft 404s: does a missing page really return 404

$curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code} %{redirect_url}\n' https://example.com/diese-seite-gibt-es-nicht-$RANDOM
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Check maintenance mode for status 503 and Retry-After

$curl -s -o /dev/null -D - https://example.com/ | grep -iE '^(HTTP/|retry-after:)'
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Check the status code of all sitemap.xml URLs in parallel

$curl -s https://example.com/sitemap.xml | grep -oP '(?<=<loc>)[^<]+' | xargs -P 8 -I{} curl -o /dev/null -s -w '%{http_code} %{url_effective}\n' {} | grep -v '^200 ' | sort
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Check the X-Robots-Tag header of a URL

$curl -s -o /dev/null -D - https://example.com/ | grep -i '^x-robots-tag'
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Collect all URLs from a sitemap index

$curl -s https://example.com/sitemap_index.xml | grep -oP '(?<=<loc>)[^<]+' | xargs -n1 curl -s | grep -oP '(?<=<loc>)[^<]+' | sort -u
harmlessSEO checks

Extract all URLs from a sitemap.xml

$curl -s https://example.com/sitemap.xml | grep -oP '(?<=<loc>)[^<]+' | sort -u
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