Everything You Need To Know About Googlebot User Agent 

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All search engine web crawlers have user agents.

The Googlebot is one of the most common ones you will see in your server logs.

Here’s the problem:

Sometimes people mask themselves as Googlebot. This can affect your SEO results and even end up with you having content stolen by spammers.

But if you understand Googlebot’s user agents, you can:

In this blog, I will tell you everything you need to know about Googlebot user agent and how to use it to improve your SEO.

What is Googlebot User Agent?

Googlebot user agent identifies Googlebot as it makes a request to crawl the content on your site.

Googlebot has a number of user agents that it uses to do its job properly.

How Does Googlebot User Agent Work?

You have lots of different elements on your site:

And more.

When Googlebot comes to crawl your site it needs to understand each of those elements. Googlebot has different user agents to understand different elements on a web page.

Googlebot also has user agents specific to different devices.

For example, it may crawl your site from the perspective of:

Each would look slightly different.

The Difference between User-Agents and Crawlers

Think of it like this:

Googlebot is the name of the search engine crawler whose job is to scan through the internet to find and follow links.

The user agent identifies that it’s Googlebot that wants to access the information on the site. In other words, the user agent is the name of Googlebot.

You then have user-agent strings that identify the more specific details about Googlebot.

The user agent string will tell you the:

A typical user agent string from Googlebot looks similar to this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

Web browsers like Google Chrome and Firefox also have user agents.

Any time you go to a new site, the browser user agent requests the site’s current version.

List Of The Current Googlebot User Agents

Google is a very powerful search engine.

They collect a lot of data on tons of different things to help users find what they are looking for. To help with this Google has 18 different user agents:

As you can see Google has different user agents to deliver all of their different services.

Not all of them are relevant for SEO.

How To Use Googlebot User Agent for SEO

If you know what information Google’s crawlers are using, you can verify whether Googlebot sees the same content on a website as a regular user does.

You can easily do this now with the Google Chrome browser:

Load a website, right-click on the page then click Inspect.

Click the 3 dot symbol, mouseover more tools then click Network Conditions.

Now select the Googlebot user agent from the dropdown.

Reload the page. You will now see the page the same as how Googlebot sees it.

The Best User Agents for SEO

Not all Googlebot User Agents are relevant for SEO.

There is a much smaller list to focus on:

Keep these in mind when working with Googlebot user agents for SEO purposes.

Stuck in the Google sandbox period? Read my guide to learn how to get out of Google sandbox as quickly as possible.

How To Block Fake Googlebot Crawlers

Seeing Googlebot traffic but not sure it’s real?

It’s common for spammers to mask themselves as Googlebot and access your site.

You can verify whether or not it really is Googlebot. The easiest way to do this is by using the IP address because faking an IP address is really hard.

Here’s how to check:

Now verify that the root domain name is either googlebot.com or google.com.

Found a fake bot?

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Googlebot’s User Agents are very important to help Google provide the best results to their users.

Make sure that you optimise your site for crawl performance so Googlebot can do its job properly.

Remember:

Spammers often mask themselves as Googlebot user agents. If you notice your site suddenly getting lots of traffic from Google, double-check the IP address from your server logs.

Getting ahead of it will save you trouble in the future.

Want to learn more about bots? Check out:

PRO TIPS: To improve your SEO performance, make sure to use all the Google tools available. Don’t know anything about these tools? Take a look at my list of Google tools.